"“It's a World of Trees, Where Humans Have Just Arrived” : a

Comparative Study on Contemporary Narratives About Trees"

Kruise, Lisa

ABSTRACT

The anthropogenic climate crisis is partly due to humanity’s perception of nature. The Western philosophy
and Descartes’ influence have created a nature/culture boundary that separates humans from the other
living beings, when in reality, humanity and other creatures (animal and plant) are clearly interdependent.
This nature/culture boundary is partly the cause of the destructive attitude humans take with regard to
nature. Deforestation, for example, is partly the product of this lack of bond between humans and trees;
trees are seen as passive, when in fact they are very complex beings. To correct this misperception
of trees and nature, humanity urgently needs a new narrative that can show the interconnectedness of
humans with nature and make humans understand that other creatures have as much right as they have
to live on earth. This master thesis studies how a chosen corpus of three books tries to demonstrate
the interconnection between trees and humans and to promote a different relationship with trees, not
solely based on exploitation. The analysis pays particular attention to the literary techniques used by
these three authors to show that trees and humans are actually interconnected. The first chapter analyses
“The Hidden Life of Trees” (2016) by Peter Wohlleben and covers the debate on anthropomorphism. The
second chapter analyses “The Overstory” (2019) by Richard Powers and how the author interconnects the
human characters with trees in the narrative. The third chapter analyses how capitalism decimates trees
and Native Americans in “Barkskins” (201...

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Contemporary Narratives About Trees.  Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres, Université catholique de
Louvain, 2020. Prom. : De Bruyn, Ben. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/thesis:27220

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 “It's a World of Trees, Where
Humans Have Just Arrived”
A Comparative Study on Contemporary Narratives
About Trees

Auteur : Lisa Kruise

Promoteur(s) : Ben De Bruyn
Année académique 2019-2020
Master en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale, à finalité
approfondie (anglais-français)
 Nous sommes tellement éloignés de la nature, nous
l’avons tellement modifiée, manipulée, détruite,
nous avons si bien oublié qu’elle est l’art par
excellence, que seul un artifice de plus, celui de
l’art humain, peut nous aider à la retrouver. Parce
que nous avons perdu toute relation d’immédiateté
avec la nature, nous avons besoin de la médiation
supplémentaire de l’art pour restaurer l’unité que
nous formions avec elle1.
— herman de vries2

1
“We are so estranged from nature, we have modified, manipulated and destroyed it so much; we have
forgotten so well that it is art par excellence, that only one more device, that of human art, can help us to
reconnect with it. Because we have lost all sense of immediacy with nature, we need the additional mediation
of art to restore the unity we once had with it.” (My translation)
2
herman de vries chooses not to capitalise his name because he is opposed to hierarchical ways of thinking.
Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank my professor Ben De

Bruyn for his detailed comments and his involvement in
the correction of my master thesis. With him I discovered
the fascinating world of ecocriticism and I thank him for
that.

I would like to thank my family for their support: I am

grateful to my mother for always listening to my
complaints and for her unfailing encouragement and
support. I also want to thank my father for worrying about
the progress of my dissertation and for suggesting to relax
even when there was no time to do so. I am thankful to my
brother for putting up with me for all these long days of
lockdown when we had to study together; thanks for
always laughing at my lousy jokes. Thanks to Spip, even
if her help is not really noticeable, I know that deep down
she supports me.

A big thank you to Vishank for his unfailing patience and

his instructions worthy of a Buddhist monk; I hope one
day to be as enlightened as you. Thanks to your tee-shirts
for absorbing my tears.

I would also like to thank my friends, without whose help

I would be lost. Thank you, Laura, for your
resourcefulness and all the great tips which helped me a
lot. I am thankful to Heloise for bringing her bright mood
in the library. Thanks to Francesca for checking on the
language.

Last but not least, I would also like to thank Patricia

Goffin for her energy and inspiration.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................................ 4

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................... 7
1. Trees in literature ...................................................................................................................................... 7
2. Deforestation and Creating a New Narrative for our Relationship with Nature ...................................... 9
3. Ecocriticism ............................................................................................................................................. 11
4. Corpus and research question................................................................................................................. 13

Chapter One: The Hidden Life of Trees and the Debate on Anthropomorphism ........................................ 15
1. The Plant Turn ......................................................................................................................................... 17
2. Rhetoric of Wonder ................................................................................................................................. 19
3. Anthropomorphism ................................................................................................................................. 20
4. Natural Selection, Mutual Aid and Agency ............................................................................................. 23
5. The Limits of Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial .......................................................................... 26
6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 28

Chapter Two: The Overstory and the Maximalist Novel: Finding a Balance Between Human and Tree
Representation .............................................................................................................................................. 30
1. The Maximalist Novel ............................................................................................................................. 32
2. The Omniscient Narrator and the Human Characters: a Balance Between Facts and Emotions ........... 34
3. Human and Trees Interconnected ........................................................................................................... 36
4. Patricia Westeford .................................................................................................................................. 37
5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 41

Chapter Three: Naturalism and the Capitalocene in Barkskins .................................................................. 43

1. The Naturalistic Novel ............................................................................................................................. 45
2. Imagination and the Natives .................................................................................................................. 51
3. Evolution of Forests’ Perception ............................................................................................................. 55
4. Natives, the Forest and Hybridity ........................................................................................................... 57
5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 59

Chapter Four: Scale and Posthumanism, a Comparative Study of the Corpus .......................................... 60
1. General Trends on Literary Mechanisms Used in the Corpus.................................................................. 61
2. Scale, planetary space and time ............................................................................................................. 62
3. Posthumanism, Characters and Death ................................................................................................... 65
a. Characters .......................................................................................................................................... 66
b. Death .................................................................................................................................................. 67

Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................... 69

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................... 73
Primary Sources ................................................................................................................................................ 73
Secondary Sources ............................................................................................................................................ 73
Introduction
When I was a child, I sometimes went to the public library with my mother to select some books
to read for bedtime. Once, she picked up an audiobook called L’arbre qui pleure3 (2007) by
Marlène Jobert. The story was that of an old woodcutter named Victor who one day, as usual,
went to the forest to cut down trees. On that day, the woodcutter had barely put his axe in an
oak tree, when a horrifying sound came from the tree on which his axe fell. The tree was
howling in pain. Against a terrifying musical background, the storyteller and narrator of the
story said that the other trees of the forest started moving as if they wanted to escape from the
woodcutter and his axe. The narrator added that the “overwhelming desire [of the other trees]
to stay alive moved Victor deeply4” (Jobert & Mansot, 2007). After that remarkable episode,
the woodcutter feels disgusted by his work and swears to the trees that he will quit his job
immediately. The agonising sound of the tree was so disturbing for the child I was that it still
remains in my memory today. The woodcutter later finds a job as a gardener for a rich family,
but when Christmas comes and the mistress of the house asks Victor to cut a tree, Victor refuses
and says he would rather leave than fell a tree. When he is about to leave, Victor and the little
girl of the house witness the trees turn gold, and the little girl who was mute recovers her voice.
The little girl and her mother understand the mysterious link between the trees and their
gardener, and in the following years, they decorate their Christmas tree in the forest. The story
has no link with the climate crisis, but it is interesting to note how such an expression of pain –
the cry of the oak tree – can speak to the child/reader and relate to his own experience of pain
and thus foster empathy for the tree.

1. Trees in literature
Marlène Jobert’s story is a clear example of a narrative establishing a bond between a human
and a tree, a bond created by a shared experience of pain. There are countless stories with trees
in literature, but more often these stories are about forests as a whole, a body of trees that forms
one entity. Forests have always been there as a setting in literature, however, forests are also
used in literature because of their strong symbolic value. A forest has an ambivalent symbolism
and is often represented as either an enchanted place or an ominous one. For instance, the epic
called Gilgamesh, “whose Sumerian version [c. the second millennium BC] figures as the oldest
literary work in history” (Harrison, 1992, p.14), narrates the crusade Gilgamesh leads against

3
The Crying Tree
4
“Leur immense désir de rester vivant bouleversa Victor ” (Jobert & Mansot, 2007, my translation)
7
the demon of the forest, Huwawa (Harrison, 1992, p.15). Old fairy tales, like Little Red Riding
Hood, take the forest as setting because of the atmosphere of danger it conveys. The symbolism
of forests can still be found in contemporary novels and other works of art. To cite only three
examples, Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (1998), Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days
(2015) and Adelinne Dieudonné La Vrai vie5 (2018) all feature an ambivalent forest. The forest
is in these stories on the one hand a place to learn and grow as an individual, as well as a shelter
to hide from danger. On the other hand, it is also a place from where the danger comes – the
forest as a primitive and unruly place is in fact an extremely recurrent stereotype in many
literary works, it is the “shadow of civilization” as Harrison puts it. From the forest comes a
rapist in Into the Forest; in Little Red Riding Hood it is a wolf, in Our Endless Numbered Days,
the father of the protagonist goes mad from living in the woods and becomes a threat to his
daughter. In La Vraie vie, the father of the narrator organises a vicious hunting game in which
the narrator is hunted like a prey.

Apart from symbolic uses of the forest, these stories are not really concerned about the forest
and the singular trees in their literal meaning, i.e. simply as living beings which live on earth
with other living beings (humans and animals)6. One of the reasons why we might want to
consider this specific relation is because of the current climate crisis. The climate crisis is
caused, among many other factors, by the tendency of our civilisation to create boundaries
between what is designated as “nature” and what is called “culture”. The old Cartesian dualism
considers what is not human as part of nature (i.e. plants, animals, etc.) and believes in the
superiority of culture over nature. Trees, plants in general and animals are seen as mere
commodities which can be used for our needs and not as fellow creatures which have the same
right to live on earth as humans do. However, in practice, humanity is not separated from the
rest of the living beings on earth, on the contrary, it is deeply interconnected with them. Trees
provide oxygen and shelter from the rain and the sun; some trees are historical landmarks are
central elements of a human community. As a result, our actions affect our environment and a
damaged environment becomes inhospitable for humans. Hence the need for our imaginary to
evolve from a binary understanding of the world, to a conception of the world where every
living being is connected, from plants to humans.

5
Real Life (2020)
6
It could also be argued that a preference to see the individual tree is anthropocentric. In fact, the concept of
the individual is a human concept which negates the fact that trees are a part of a group and that they are
interconnected by their roots.
8
The aim of this introduction is first to demonstrate the importance of trees and to briefly address
the state of forests nowadays; it also seeks to show the importance of creating a new narrative
in the time of the anthropogenic climate crisis: deforestation is in part the result of the Western
philosophical traditions which considers that nature is separated from culture, when these two
entities are in fact completely interconnected. A new narrative changing humans’ perception
of nature – i.e. from nature as a commodity to nature as a living thing with as much right to live
on earth as humans – is crucial in our era, and this thesis studies how books try to create this
new narrative.

2. Deforestation and Creating a New Narrative for our Relationship with

Nature
However, our civilisation is still far from achieving this goal since deforestation is a major issue
in the world. Deforestation is caused by logging for paper or furniture and structures made of
wood, but also by “farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling”, which, when
“combined[,] account for more than half of all deforestation” (Nunez, 2019). Plantations of soy
(which is used to feed livestock) and palm oil (used as a cheaper alternative to other vegetable
oils) are greatly responsible for deforestation. Then there are wildfires as well, which can be
unintentional, but aggravated by climate change; or intentional, in the aim of clearing the
space to grow soy for example. The WWF reports that “we’re losing 18.7 million acres of
forests annually, equivalent to 27 soccer fields every minute” ("Deforestation and Forest
Degradation | Threats | WWF", n.d.). The consequences of this massive deforestation are
“increased greenhouse gas emissions” because trees store CO 2, which is released in the
atmosphere when they are cut down; “disruption of water cycles” because trees are crucial
components of the cycle of water; “increased soil erosion” when trees have been removed from
an area and their roots no longer hold the soil together; and “disrupted livelihood”, i.e. the
people who depend on forests’ fruits to live, people who live in the forests and all the species
which become endangered when their habitat is altered ("Deforestation and Forest Degradation
| Threats | WWF", n.d.). Reforesting the planet seems like an evident solution and it is cheap in
fact, but it is not as simple as it may seem, and planting trees requires much more patience and
time than cutting them down. Moreover, some cases of massive reforestation have proven to be
more damaging than beneficial7 (Elbein, 2019). What is more, planting new forests can help

7
In Canada for example, scientists found that the 2016 Fort McMurray Fire had been exteremely violent due to
the fact that black spruce was planted on wetlands. Wetlands are resistant to wildfires, but the area was drained
because of the plantation of the black spruce, thus increasing the intensity of the wildfires (Elbein, 2019).

9
diminish the carbon in the atmosphere but it should go hand in hand with the reduction of our
carbon emissions, which in turn requires a major change in our approach when it comes to
production and land use.

Such a description of the state of forests and deforestation might sound cold and factual, but it
also helps us realize how dependent on forests human beings are. However, as said above,
beyond considering forests as key for our survival, thinking of trees as living beings in their
own rights would also benefit their preservation. If trees were dearer to us or if humans could
be attached to trees, they would be more likely to be careful with deforestation. Companies like
Ikea, which use 1% of the world’s wood per year (Kelly, 2012) and its concept of cheap
furniture, is not especially eco-friendly. Their low-quality furniture has a very short lifespan,
which makes consumers buy more furniture in their lives than if they had bought sturdier
furniture8. To help our civilisation progress in its use of materials and to move away from the
Western philosophical tradition which considers animals and plants as inferior to humans,
stories can be used as a way to promote and rethink our relationship with nature. The problem
of massive deforestation will not be solved by books, but good stories have impacts on readers,
like L’arbre qui pleure, which uses the cry as a tool to captivate the reader and to make them
realise that the tree is not an object but a living being. Giula Pacini, who studied the change of
tree’s place in the French imaginary between the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century,
suggests that, in the face of the climate crisis, we need a new “myth” which will modify our
relationship to nature (Pacini, 2016, p.194). This new narrative should show which we are part
of a network composed of other living beings instead of clinging to a nature/culture boundary
that separates humans from other creatures. Lawrence Buell also argues that fiction is an
effective medium for absorbing new information and for inspiring readers:

Imaginative literature is best suited to engaging people intellectually and emotionally, providing
them a greater personal stake in the text itself, and making them care. Fiction is frequently less
didactic and more nuanced than nonfiction, delivering its messages by implication. Personal
engagement minus didacticism equals inspiration (Dwyer, 2010, p.7).

Pacini also adds that it might feel overwhelming to try and connect to nature as a whole, but
connecting to a specific tree in our garden or neighbourhood might be less intimidating and “a

8
Nevertheless, sturdier furniture also involves cutting older trees. A more ecological solution would then be a
society which promotes the repairing furniture.
10
first step toward rethinking and rebalancing our relationship with the wider natural world”
(Pacini, 2016, p.195).

This thesis is concerned with the ways particular contemporary books – two from America, one
from Germany – deal with creating a human-tree bond but also reflect on the complexity and
the limits of this task. If we take L’arbre qui pleure as an example, it can be seen that the writer
uses anthropomorphism – i.e. projecting human features, behaviours or emotions onto other
living beings and things – to bring the woodcutter and the people who use wood products
unthinkingly closer to the trees in the forest, to make them realise that the trees are alive. In this
master thesis I intend to analyse a corpus of literary works and discuss how these deal with the
topic of deforestation and trees, how they try to portray a different way to interact with trees
and the difficulties or conveying such a relationship. Before looking at the corpus in more detail,
I will define the field to which this thesis belongs – ecocriticism.

3. Ecocriticism
The term “ecocriticism” was coined in the 1970s by William Rueckert (Dwyer, 2010, p.2) and
designates the study of the relationship between the environment and literature. Before the late
twentieth century, the environment was commonly analysed as a setting in literary criticism but
never really involved “environmental history and the environmental and social sciences”
(Buell, Heise and Thornber, 2011, p.418). In fact, environmental criticism is an inter-
disciplinary movement which considers different forms of art along with literature, and which
includes findings of other human sciences as well as scientific findings. However, this later
field is subject to criticism since science is sometimes identified as the source of the ecological
crisis. Two distinct waves in the history of the ecocritical field are generally identified. The
first wave began around the 1990s, involving researchers mainly from Anglo-Saxon countries,
and is primarily concerned with nature writing and the local and regional environment. The
second wave started in the years 2000s and is no longer solely the result of American or English
research, but of research from various parts of the world with influential researchers such as
Ursula K. Heise (German), or Dipesh Chakrabarthy (Indian). Researchers of the second wave
move beyond the study of the traditional genre of nature writing, and highlight the global nature
of the climate crisis9. Researchers of the second wave highlight the global aspect of the climate.

9
Damages to the environment can be done locally but have global impacts. For instance, deforestation
happening in the Amazonian forest increases CO2 levels in the atmosphere globally, not only in Brazil – thus
showing the importance of thinking globally of humans’ acts.
11
They are also concerned with including other domains of research (postcolonial studies, women
studies or animal studies) and analyse the links between these domains and the environment. In
addition, they also aim to rethink the nature/culture boundary rather than reiterate it in their
analyses (Buell, Heise and Thornber, 2011, p.418-419). Ecocritism is moved by the belief that
“outside-the-box thought experiments” (Buell, Heise and Thornber, 2011, p.418) can help to
create debates about environmental concerns and also to develop alternatives to our society
(Buell, Heise and Thornber, 2011, p.418). Ecocriticism studies any work related to nature and
our relationship with it, or to the climate crisis, whether it is a detail in a novel or a central
theme. Literary works where the climate crisis is a central theme are called ecofictions. An
ecofiction is, according to Jim Dwyer, “fiction that deals with environmental issues or the
relation between humanity and the physical environment, that contrasts traditional and
industrial cosmologies, or in which nature or the land has a prominent role” (Dwyer, 2010, p.2).

Studies on the plant world in ecocriticism is still minor. In fact, sub-categories stated in
definitions of ecocriticism are for example “postcolonialism”, or “animals”, but there is no
category for plants. Both Dwyer’s in Where the Wild Books Are (2010) and Buell, Heise and
Thornber in “Literature and Environment” (2011), who define ecocriticism and its main
research topics mention animal studies but do not refer to plants. Therefore, much of the study
of plants is based on what has already been done in animal studies. Animal studies have greatly
developed recently, and their relative popularity – in comparison to plants – could also be
explained by the gap between human’s experience of the world and that of trees. Human and
animals can move and have bodies which stop growing at some point in their lives, while plants
are considered by people as mainly static and grow, make buds, lose leaves and change their
appearance, although the life of plants is more complex than that. It has also been proven that
certain animals suffer like humans, while the same cannot be said for trees. However, there is
a noticeable growing interest in plants and trees, as can be seen with popularisation of concepts
such as “crown shyness10”. This growing interest in the plant world is called the “plant turn”,
which will be further defined in chapter one.

About the particular topic of trees in literature, there are specific studies, like Giula Pacini’s for
instance, but there are no systematic studies on trees in contemporary literature. However,
several works of reference examine how the forest has been perceived through time like

10
The fact that the crowns of trees do not touch each other which, seen from under the canopy, makes a network
pattern.
12
Forests. The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison, and in the French-speaking
world, the works of Andrée Corvol. Harrison’s book examines how the forest has often been
considered in literature as an antagonist to the Western civilisation. The forest has also been
studied for their place in fairy tales like in Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland. Maitland’s
book demonstrates how fairy tales and the forest are interconnected, and nowadays, both
threatened. These books are interesting because they examine how our beliefs about the forest
can be found in literature. However, these books do not consider, like Pacini, the relationship
humans can have with other living beings as equals; they are useful to understand humans’
perception of forests, and where our stereotypes come from, but they do not give clues as to
build a kinder relationship between trees and humans.

4. Corpus and research question

The chosen corpus is composed of a non-fiction book and two novels or ecofictions. First, The
Hidden Life of Trees (2016) by Peter Wohlleben, originally written in German, explores the
behaviour of trees, with a mix of scientific research as well as the author’s observations during
his work as a forest ranger. Second is The Overstory (2019), a novel by Richard Powers, which
follows nine characters from different backgrounds in America, and their relationship to trees
as they evolve in life. All the characters commit themselves at different levels to protecting
trees. Finally, Barkskins (2017) by Annie Proulx follows two families over three hundred years
of history and their link to deforestation – the Sel family is a poor, biracial (French and
Mi’kmaq) family which cuts trees in lumber camps for a living, and the Dukes are a rich family
who created an important lumber company in the United States. Barkskins is also a history of
capitalism and how it treats nature and ethnic minorities.

The three books have been roughly published in the same period (2016, 2017 and 2019), they
all share a concern for the climate crisis, and are all of course about trees but also about humans’
perception of trees. They all are popular books: The Overstory has received several awards
including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and both The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees
have been translated in several languages; Barkskins has just been adapted into a series by
National Geographic. The study is limited in the sense that the corpus is restricted to three
books, and it cannot, as a consequence, establish general tendencies on trees in contemporary
literature. What is more, one of the works of the corpus is a non-fiction book, making this study
not strictly about ecofictions. But The Hidden Life of Trees is a good example of a book which

13
tries to rehabilitate the image nature and trees humans’ minds and has thus been chosen on the
base of this criterion.

Each book of the corpus and its own way of dealing with the topic of trees, deforestation and
humans' relationship with nature is analysed in a separate chapter. Each book is also an
opportunity to address various topics related to ecocriticism, such as the Anthropocene,
anthropomorphism, posthumanism, vulgarisation, etc. More specifically, this master thesis
looks at how these books represent or promote this human-tree relationship through stylistic
figures and other literary techniques.

The three first chapters of this thesis each focus on one book from the corpus. Chapter one
examines Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees as well as the gaps between humans’ and
trees’ experience of the world and how publications of the plant turn try to reenchant science
in order to reduce this gap. Chapter two analyses Richard Powers’ The Overstory and explains
how this maximalist novel tries to seek a balance between the representation of humans and
that of trees. The novel also contains metafictional reflections on ecofictions and narratives
which aim to change our perception of nature. Chapter three discusses Annie Proulx’s
Barkskins, and describes, within the fram of the naturalist novel, how capitalism treats ethnic
minorities and nature. The last chapter summarises the findings of the previous three chapters
and compares the three books as well as assesses how they deal with planetary scale and
posthumanist considerations.

14
 Chapter One: The Hidden Life of Trees and the Debate on
Anthropomorphism

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating

a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of
something that forever grows one step richer and
subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about
reverence, not mastery
—Richard Powers, The Overstory

This first chapter analyses which particular literary mechanisms Peter Wohlleben uses in The
Hidden Life of Trees, in order to bring humans to feel closer to trees. This thesis starts with the
analysis of Wohlleben’s non-fiction because his primary method is the use of anthropomorphic
language – the showing or treating of animals, gods, and objects as if they are human in
appearance, character or behaviour (“Anthropocentrism”, n.d.). Anthropomorpic language is
an intuitive mechanism used by humans to understand the world of other living beings, and The
Hidden Life of Trees can thus be seen as an attempt to copy our instinctive mechanisms of
understanding the world and transfer it to the understanding of trees. Peter Wohlleben’s book
reflects a change in society’s perception of plants called “the plant turn” – a recent
interdisciplinary movement which uses scientific findings of the past decades about plants to
reimagine plants’ place in the world. The Hidden Life of Trees thus covers several introductory
aspects of plants studies and of the instinctive mechanisms used to understand other living
beings, while the two next chapters cover other literary mechanisms which are “less intuitive”.

The Hidden Life of Trees. What They Feel, How They Communicate. Discoveries from a Secret
World, known as Das geheime Leben der Bäume in German, is a nonfiction book about trees
and how these organisms behave, written by the German forest ranger Peter Wohlleben. This
non-fiction is, on the one hand, the result of Wohlleben’s observations and experience acquired
during his career. As a forest ranger, Peter Wohlleben tends to the woods of Hummel, Germany,
where originally, heavy machinery and chemicals were used to manage the forest, and trees
were cut and sold as a source of profit. A few years ago, Wohlleben made his municipality
transition to a more environmentally friendly forestry, which uses horses instead of machines
and creates alternate ways to generate profit from the forest, without cutting trees down, such
as workshops in the woods, or burials in the forest (McGrane, 2016). In addition, The Hidden
Life of Trees is also a synthesis of the scientific research of the past decades on trees, but also
15
to a certain extent on plants in general, mushrooms, and animals. The book is written in an
informal, emphatic and anthropomorphic language, in order to make scientific research
available to lay people. It is structured in small chapters, each addressing a specific topic related
to trees, among which: trees’ connections with other trees or other living beings such as
mushrooms and animals; how trees “decide” when it is the right moment to shed their leaves;
how trees communicate the presence of predators. In other words, these different sections and
topics aim to describe trees in a way that clearly invalidates stereotypes about plant immobility
and passivity. This inclination to reconsider the belief that plants are passive and thus not worth
of human’s attention is a characteristic of publications such as The Hidden Life of Trees, which
are part of the so-called “plant turn” movement. In fact, The Hidden Life of Trees is part of a
body of works which seek to change our vision of nature and plants, i.e. not only considering
trees as commodities for our needs, but rather and also, thinking of trees as fellow creatures
with as much right to live on earth as humans have, and thus respecting their own ways of
thriving.

In order to shift from a vision of trees and nature based on utilization to a more enchanted vision
of nature, Wohlleben uses different kinds of mechanisms. Firstly, a rhetoric of awe and wonder
at nature can be identified and linked to the 18th century and the Romantic movement;
Wohlleben in fact often uses the words “magic” and “wonder” to refer to trees. Second,
Wohlleben makes a heavy use of anthropomorphic language, such as in the sentence “Dozens
of offspring from other years also stand at their mothers’ feet” (Wohlleben, 2016, p.29,
emphasis added) and many expressions which are not related to how the world of tree is actually
behaving, scientifically speaking, but rather related to how humans behave. Anthropomorphism
is much debated and highly contested by the scientific community but has the benefit of
reaching a broader audience and making academic findings more accessible to lay people. The
Hidden Life of Trees is in fact very popular amongst its readers – it has been translated in many
languages – but less so in the academic world, to the extent that a petition was written against
the publishing of The Hidden Life of Trees. A third mechanism used is the semantics of
cooperation – Wohlleben’s trees help each other – or of natural selection – Wohlleben often
uses words which denote struggles or rivalry, which give the reader the impression that the trees
are capable of movement, and as a result erases the idea of tree passivity.

The structure of this chapter is the following. The first section examines in more depth the plant
turn and the challenges related to the particular modes of being of plants. Then, each following

16
section will address one of the literary mechanisms used by Peter Wohlleben to bridge the
imaginary gap between humans and plants: the rhetoric of awe, anthropomorphism, and the use
of the semantic field of cooperation and natural selection. In the last part, the limits of
anthropocentrism, and its contrary, “antropodenial” as well as possible alternatives to these will
be discussed.

1. The Plant Turn

As mentioned above, the plant turn designates a renewed interest in plants from authors of
different backgrounds who use scientific findings of the past decades about plants to reimagine
their place in the world. The plant turn is a corollary to the more established “animal turn”,
which refers to a renewed interest in animals’ place and representation within the human
sciences and led to the creation of the field of animal studies. As Harriet Ritvo explains, scholars
of most of the branches of human sciences have progressively included animals in their
research, adapting scientific works to the changes in society, similarly to how other movements
had been included in academic research in the past. Such movements had formerly included
women as an answer to the feminist movement, and the field of Women’ studies was later
created; another approach emerged from the decolonisation movement, and led to including
postcolonial considerations into research and in turn, to the establishment of postcolonial
studies (Animals & Society Institute, 2019). Animal studies and the animal rights movement
also aim to rethink our relationship with non-human animals and question on which moral basis
animals can or cannot be used by humans, and more importantly, how we can simply live with
animals without destroying the conditions to their lives. The animal turn and the plant turn are
also non-anthropocentric or posthuman turns – both rejecting to conceive humans as central
entity in the world (as opposed to plans or animals for example) – because they move away
from a human perspective on the world. Peter Wohlleben makes some references to animal
studies11 in The Hidden Life of Trees, in order to establish a parallel with the evolution of
animals’ status. The plant turn is an even greater challenge as a movement, as there is a greater
gap between humans and plants than there is with animals:

I applaud these changes because we are now discovering that animals share many human
emotions. And not just mammals, which are closely related to us, but even insects such as fruit
flies. Researchers in California have discovered that even these tiny creatures might dream.

11
The author also published a book on animals: The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief, and Compassion:
Surprising Observations of a Hidden World (2017).
17
 Sympathy for flies? That’s quite a stretch for most people, and the emotional path to the forest
is even more of a stretch. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.242)

Writings of the plant turn, says Natasha Myers, “encourage their readers to consider the
extension of the concepts of intelligence, thought, communication, and cognition to plants,
organisms that have hitherto seemed so passive, so mute, so still.” (Myers, 2015, p.40). The
Hidden Life of Trees easily fits in this movement, since, as has been explained above,
Wohlleben tries to open the reader’s eyes on the complex life of trees and tries to erase the
stereotype of trees as passive living beings. Like the animal turn, the plant turn makes people
aware of the importance of plants, be it the sense that they play an important role in human life
(as food, or for trees, as furniture or paper), but also in the sense that they are condition to the
proper functioning of the earth (trees store CO2, trees and other plants are food and shelter for
animals and humans; they interact with creatures belonging to their ecosystem). And beyond
thinking in terms of the usefulness of trees and plants, trees are forms or life in their own right.

However, as said Wohlleben at the end of The Hidden Life of Trees, the plant turn is more
challenging than the animal turn. People have now assimilated the idea that animal are sentient
beings, which have intellectual and social abilities very close to that of humans. Plants are
certainly intelligent and can do many things, but they do not suffer in a way humans can relate
to (a video of the treatment of animals in industrial farms will trigger a sense of disgust in the
audience, while a video of trees being cut down might trigger sadness for the ecological
consequences of deforestation, but it is less certain that it will trigger empathy for trees being
cut). According to Michael Marder in “The Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy” (2012),
plants are different from humans/animals on two different levels. Ontologically, plants are
mostly static – that is, in terms of human perception of the world; trees, as demonstrates
Wohlleben, are much more dynamic, mobile and interconnected than people think – and they
are not capable of proper movement, but they are not inanimate things either (Marder, 2012,
p.262). Metaphysically, “as opposed to animals and humans, plants live without psychic
interiority; they lack the metaphysical distinction between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ and do
not set themselves in opposition to the environment that sustains them” (Marder, 2012, p.263).
Marder adds that plants are “capable of registering stressful environmental stimuli and reacting
at the level of biochemical changes in the cells of leaves and stems, [but] they do not suffer in
the same way as sentient beings permeated by a network of nerves” (Marder, 2012, p.263). It
thus more challenging for humans to relate to trees, and this is why the authors of the chosen

18
corpus need to compensate in a way or another to serve their aim of bringing trees closer to
humans.

2. Rhetoric of Wonder
Peter Wohlleben uses a rhetoric of awe and wonder at nature, which has its originins in the
Romantic movement (c. the end of the 18th century). This rhetoric is also used in The Overstory,
where the sight of trees triggers mystical revelations and epiphanies. This aura of mystery starts
with the title and the words “hidden” and “secret world”, and is prolonged by a foreword by
Tim Flannery, an Australian scientist and environmentalist:

We read in fairy tales of trees with human faces, trees that can talk, and sometimes walk. This
enchanted forest is the kind of place, I feel sure, that Peter Wohlleben inhabits. His deep
understanding of the lives of trees, reached through decades of careful observation and study,
reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become
magical places for you, too. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.vii)

Flannery uses the word “magic” and promises, in a way, that this book will change our vision
of trees. Flannery highlights the relationship between “careful observation”, i.e. scientific study,
and the magical aspect of nature, stating indirectly that scientific study re-enchants our view of
trees. The re-enchanting of nature is something, Myers argues, which is common to publications
of the plant turn which “promise that your view of plants will forever be changed” (Myers,
2015, p.41). The forest is, what is more, not only a magical place, but it is something which
Peter Wohlleben wants to preserve. When the German forest ranger tells the reader about the
functioning of forests, he also explains how these processes are altered through climate change
and what it means for humanity. He explains the roles of old growth forests in comparison with
plantations of trees:

Whereas the old-growth forests offers soft, crumbly, humus-rich, and constantly moist soil for
their delicate roots, European parks offer hard surfaces that have been depleted from nutrients
and compacted after years of urbanization. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.170)

Peter Wohlleben states that this “book is a lens to help [us] take a closer look at what [we]
might have taken for granted” (Wohlleben, 2016, p.xi). The reason why people take trees for
granted is explained in the foreword by Flannery: “One reason that many of us fail to understand
trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce
19
in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That’s 115 times longer than the average human
lifetime” (Wohlleben, 2016, p.vii). Because of this gap in our experience of life as trees and as
humans, Wohlleben tries to draw our attention on trees with the use of a vocabulary oriented
towards the semantic field of magic and wonder, and describes all the stages of trees’ lives, the
challenges they face and the very complex mechanics behind trees which involves other living
beings such as insects and mushroom, in order to oppose the perceived stillness:

I encourage you to look around where you live. What dramas are being played out in wooded
areas you can explore? How are commerce and survival balanced in the forests and woodlands
you know? This book is a lens to help you take a closer look at what you might have taken for
granted. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.x)

3. Anthropomorphism
The central way with which Wohlleben brings his readers close to trees is with the use of
anthropocentric language. This is also what the scientific community mainly criticises about
this non-fiction book. Some scholars claim Wohlleben has distorted scientific findings, and a
petition was even published against his book:

We believe that this book is further proof of the sad situation that oversimplification and
emotional explanations of complex matters are better received by a wide audience than factual
information generated by thorough investigations. In the long-term, the environment in general
and forests in particular will not be helped by the sort of unenlightened thinking promoted by
the hidden reality of this book… This book cannot be classified as popular science. Instead
claims are portrayed as facts which serve as a storyline that appeals to the mainstream. ("Even
in the forest, it’s facts we want instead of fairy tales - Online-Petition", n.d.)

Whether the facts stated are distorted or not, Peter Wohlleben uses an anthropomorphic
language which is very much debated nowadays, and which is especially controversial in a non-
fiction book about trees. Anthropocentric language has probably played a role in the wide
audience which Wohlleben gained with his book – scientific language is arduous for most
people – and this audience probably considers plants in a new light after reading The Hidden
Life of Trees. However, scientists contest the use of this kind language because it can convey
wrong information, such the suggestion that plants have emotions or have some kind of
intentions or “agency” – i.e. the fact of doing purposeful acts. And from yet another point of

20
view, posthumanists regret that the use of human-derived language makes it impossible to truly
think beyond the human, and that anthropocentric language erases what is specific to plants or
animals, and thus indirectly states that what is different from humans is inferior (Myers, 2015,
p.39).

Anthropomorphism is rooted in our desire to understand the world, and the parts of it – non-
human animals and plants – which cannot use language in order to describe their vision of the
world (Brown, 2015), which we thus have to interpret. As has been said, Wohlleben uses many
anthropomorphic comparisons between trees and humans. Here are some examples:

Even in a forest, there are loners, would-be hermits who want little to do with others.
(Wohlleben, 2016, p.10)

The tree on the right is a bit more anxious than the others, or to put it more positively, more
sensible. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.152)

Beeches, spruce, and other species certainly find blue sky, which means lots of sun, equally
agreeable. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.227)

These examples among many others are representative of the language used in Wohlleben’s
non-fiction book, and how it is anthropomorphic: “loner” trees do not conceptualise that they
do not want to socialise with other trees; trees do not have emotions and therefore cannot be
“anxious” (Wohlleben often nuances his language in the book, after having stated something
very anthropocentric, as he does it in this sentence); trees do not have opinions about what is
agreeable or not. Yet, it can be noted that, even if Peter Wohlleben’s use of language is clearly
human-centred, it is still connected to the way trees actually behave, making this a milder use
of anthropocentrism. A “stronger” form of anthropocentric language can be found, for example,
in children’s books, where trees can talk, fall in love or go on vacation.

Anthropomorphism can be the reflection of different factors. It can simply be triggered by

ignorance, by not knowing what has already been established by science about certain species.
For instance, the bared-teeth display of chimpanzees can be thought to be a smile by some,
when it is in fact a sign of stress and fear (Sueur, 2017), something which has already been
established by science. Anthropomorphism can also be caused by a lack of data, where one is
forced to interpret the behaviour of a living being in order to try and understand its behaviour
21
(Sueur, 2017). In Wohlleben’s case, the reason for his use of anthropocentrism is not caused by
ignorance: he either uses anthropomorphic language to simplify the scientific language (the
examples seen above), or tries to interpret his own observations and extrapolate on findings;
for example, in chapter two (“The Language of Trees”) where he tries to demonstrate that trees
have the same five senses as humans have.

Cédric Sueur (2017) identifies different types of anthropomorphisms. First off,

anthropomorphism can be divided into two main branches: the imaginative type and the
interpretative type. Imaginative anthropomorphism is the one where animals, plants, and
objects embody an aspect of human life, a personality trait as in the 17th century Fables by La
Fontaine. For example, in the famous “The Crow and the Fox”, the crow represents an easily
flattered person and the fox a cunning one. The imaginative type of anthropomorphism is also
found in animated movies and books for kids, where animals are sometimes dressed up as
humans or speak like them. In the case of trees, one example is Grandmother Willow from the
Disney movie Pocahontas, a willow tree which has the face of an old woman and gives advice
to the protagonist. The other branch, “interpretative anthropomorphism”, is a day-to-day life
act of interpreting what a particular behaviour could mean, as explained above. This can be
linked to the two aforementioned levels of anthropocentrism: the milder version would be the
interpretative anthropomorphism, and the stronger one can be assiociated with the imaginative
anthropomorphism (which does not follow any realistic traits of the actual animal or plants they
are representing).

Sueur (2017) distinguishes other types of anthropomorphism within this second branch, one of
which is the “species anthropomorphism”, which has the benefit to identify that people do not
interpret behaviours in the same way according to the species they are analysing, whether the
species is a dog or a fly, a chimpanzee or a spider. Trees, like insects in the realm of animals,
do not physically resemble humans, and so it is rarer, in everyday life, to anthropomorphise
trees as a means to understand their behaviour. Even if we do not spontaneously use
anthropomorphic language to make sense of plants’ world – because we have difficulties
finding points of comparison – Peter Wohlleben still uses anthropomorphism in order to show
that in fact, trees and humans are not that different, and that they share many things in common.

22
 4. Natural Selection, Mutual Aid and Agency
Another rhetoric related to anthropomorphism which serves Wohlleben’s aim, is the use of the
semantic field of combat. The section title “Yours or mine” (translated in French as “Rapport
de force”) expresses this sense of competition which Wohlleben describes in The Hidden Life
of Trees. Even if it is not as visible as for animals, there is a sense of fight for survival, and the
chances to grow old for trees, Wohlleben says, are scarce. The chapter “The Tree Lottery”
explains how of the millions of seeds produced by a tree, only one will become a tree. Later in
the book, he explains that even small trees might not survive to grow taller, because, for
example, older trees might not die in time and leave a space in the canopy for the small tree to
grow – if these older trees do not fall on the small trees and ruin their chances altogether. Here
are some examples that convey this idea of vulnerability and struggle, and the fight for life:

I am most familiar with the struggles and strategies of beeches and oaks, and with the contrast
between deciduous forests that plan their own futures and coniferous forests planted for
commercial gain (Wohlleben, 2016, p.x)

After the fight for light, it is the fight for water that finally decides who wins (Wohlleben, 2016,
p.49)

Although many species of tree fight each other mercilessly above ground and even try to crowd
out each other’s root systems, the fungi that populate them seem to be intent on compromise.
(Wohlleben, 2016, p.53)

Anxious suckers sprouting at the base of the trunk are a dead giveaway. These spindly tufts of
growth ring the tree and usually quickly wither away. They indicate that the tree is engaged in
an extended fight to the death, and it is panicking. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.68)

What looks harmonious above ground turns out to be the beginning of a fight for survival below
the surface. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.69)

It goes without saying that constant struggle and rapid growth exact their toll. After the first
three decades, exhaustion sets in. The topmost branches, a yardstick for the vitality of pioneer
tree species, thin out. That in itself wouldn’t be too worrisome, but trouble is brewing under the
poplars, birches, and willows. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.184)

23
These citations clearly try to invalidate the stereotype of tree passivity, they indicate that “below
the surface” – as the fifth citation puts it – something complex is happening. The idea of struggle
helps giving movement to the tree, an idea of action which is contradictory to the belief that
trees are passive.

As much as Peter Wohlleben stresses the fight for survival among the lives of trees, echoing
the famous Darwinian theory of evolution and the ensuing survival of the fittest, he also
emphasises mutual aid, without which, he claims, trees would not survive. The concept of
mutual aid is explained in L’Entraide (2019) by Pablo Servigne and Guillaume Chapelle. The
title is chosen in reference to the Russian geographer and anarchist Peter Kropotkine who wrote
in 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, where he demonstrates that living beings tend to
help each other when in hostile environments. The authors in the book want to emphasise how
mutual aid in nature is as common as aggression and selfishness. They explain the need to
highlight mutual aid as follows:

If the economic, political and social climate deteriorates rapidly, our imagination, fed by this
monoculture of competition, will always produce the same story: war of all against all,
preventive aggressiveness […] While another scenario, that of cooperation, could just as well
emerge... if we include it in the field of possibilities!12 (Servigne & Chapelle, 2019, p.23)

Throughout the book, they thus stress how inherent mutual aid is in all living beings’ lives, and
at the end of the book, they come to formulate this conclusion:

Natural selection is […] a balance between two forces. The first acts within a group and tends
to favour the most able-bodied individuals, which often equates to the most selfish or aggressive.
This force causes conflicts within groups: it is described as disruptive. The second force acts
from outside the groups and tends to favour groups made up of more cooperative, even altruistic
individuals, because they make the group as a whole more effective13. Servigne and Chapelle,
2019, p.239).

12
« Si le climat économique, politique et social se dégrade rapidement, notre imaginaire, lui, gavé de cette
monoculture de la compétition, produira toujours la même histoire : la guerre de tous contre tous et l’agressivité
préventive […] Alors qu’un autre scénario, celui de la coopération, pourrait tout aussi bien émerger… si tant est
que nous l’incluions dans le champ des possibles ! » (Servigne & Chapelle, 2019, p.23, my translation)
13
« La sélection naturelle est donc un équilibre entre deux forces. La première agit à l’intérieur d’un groupe et
tend à favoriser les individus les plus aptes, ce qui équivaut souvent aux plus égoïstes ou aux plus agressifs. Cette
force provoque des conflits au sein des groupes : elle est qualifiée de perturbatrice. La deuxième agit de
24
Servigne and Chapelle (2019) demonstrate how mutual aid is as instinctive as aggressivity and
that, in all the realms of the living beings: plants, animals, and mostly humans. They admit
however that the choice of the word “mutual aid” has an anthropocentric connotation: “We
have chosen the term mutual aid, knowing […] that it can sometimes imply a touch of
anthropomorphism, especially when it comes to describing the behaviours of living beings that
are nothing like us14” (Servigne and Chapelle, 2019, p.27).

Even if altruism in plants can be explained by evolutionary causes and benefits, and is thus as
common in humans as it is in plants, the language of mutual aid and struggle make Wohlleben’s
tree characters livelier. The difference of timescale between humans and trees is almost erased
by this use of language since it seems that trees are able to respond quickly since it is said that
they fight back. In The Hidden Life of Trees, trees are as quick to respond, to fight back or to
help, as humans are. It feels as if trees have agency and the conscious will to help other trees.
The idea of trees fighting for their place in the forest gives them movement– and the vocabulary
of mutual aid gives them endearing traits. Wohlleben says: “I observed how hard the beeches
fought and, amazingly enough, how some of them survive to this day.” (Wohlleben, 2016, p.18)
And the fact that he describes himself seeing the beeches fight really gives the impression of
trees moving. However, “to this day” suggests that he is able to see trees struggle because he
has been observing them every day for years, thus nuancing again this use of language.

Anthropomorphism and the semantic field of mutual aid and natural selection thus give agency
to trees. Agency is part of the debate on anthropomorphism: anthropomorphic language uses
words which convey the idea of purposeful actions and make animals/plants look as if plants
or animals are doing conscious actions. Fred I. Dretske in his article on agency says that:
“Purposeful acts … are behaviors governed by thought. Such acts are an expression of agency.
Every living thing behaves, but only agents act” (Dretske, 1999, p.20). The author explains that
evolution is the reason why plants have certain behaviours. He takes the example of the Scarlet
Gilia, a flower which changes colour at some point in the year to attract pollinators. Dretske
explains that this behaviour of changing colour is due to some biological clock, acquired

l’extérieur des groupes et tend à favoriser les groupes constitués d’individus plus coopératifs, voire altruistes,
car ils rendent le collectif globalement efficace ». (Servigne and Chapelle, 2019, p.239, my translation)
14
« Nous avons choisi le terme d’entraide, conscients qu’il n’a pas la même définition pour tous, et qu’il peut
parfois impliquer une touche d’anthropomorphisme, surtout lorsqu’il s’agit de décrire les comportements
d’êtres vivants qui ne nous ressemblent en rien. » (Servigne and Chapelle, 2019, p.27, my translation)
25
through years and years of evolution, which favoured plants which changed colours, and is not
due to a purposeful act. He thus condemns authors which could say the plant changes colour
“in order to” attract pollinator because it is the evolutive system which makes the plant change
colour (Dretske, 1999, p.26). According to this paper, Peter Wohlleben would then convey a
wrong idea in his non-fiction book, as the petition published by scholars suggested. Peter
Wohlleben is not shy about giving agency to trees, since he states it directly in the beginning
of The Hidden Life of Trees:

Of course, it makes sense to ask whether tree roots are simply wandering around aimlessly
underground and connecting up when they happen to bump into roots of their own kind. Once
connected, they have no choice but to exchange nutrients. They create what looks like a social
network, but what they are experiencing is nothing more than a purely accidental give and take.
In this scenario, chance encounters replace the more emotionally charged image of active
support, though even chance encounters offer benefits for the forest ecosystem. But Nature is
more complicated than that. According to Massimo Maffei from the University of Turin,
plants—and that includes trees —are perfectly capable of distinguishing their own roots from
the roots of other species and even from the roots of related individuals. (Wohlleben, 2016, p.3)

Wohlleben’s language is no doubt anthropocentric and gives more intention and thus more
agency to trees than what has been proven by science. However, science is also very restrictive
in the agency it gives to trees, simply because what has not been proven yet cannot be claimed.
When Wohlleben uses anthropomorphic language, it is in order to illustrate in a simple manner
some complex mechanisms, but also to free trees from a scientific language which can
sometimes alienates them and also alienates lay people from understanding their surroundings.

5. The Limits of Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial

The Hidden Life of Trees calls to our emotions when it describes trees as struggling, suffering,
loving and helping creatures. It thus bases its ethics of trees on our empathy. Marder, who
studied the gaps between humans/animals’ experience of the world and plants, says plants
“embod[y] limits to empathy” (Marder, 2012, p.260). Marder claims that, since there is such a
gap in our way of being in the world, and that empathy “presupposes … the substantial
sameness of the empathizer and the empathized with”, people cannot really feel empathy for
plants. Thus, when one thinks they empathise with plants, in reality, they demonstrate empathy

26
with themselves: “a presumably sensitive ethical approach veers on the side of
instrumentalization, in that it uses the plant as a means for personal catharsis and an outlet for
the content of bad conscience” (Marder, 2012, p.263).

It could be said that Wohlleben projects his own thoughts and emotions on trees, and thus erases
a part of trees’ specificity. His reduction of the gap is made by the “sacrificing” of a part the
plants’ world. One example of that in The Hidden Life of Trees is in chapter two, where Peter
Wohlleben tackles recent findings about trees’ way to communicate. Trees send chemicals
when they are being attacked by certain predators, to “warn” other trees around of the danger.
These trees can thus produce a chemical substance that will repulse the predator if it tries to
come to them. Peter Wohlleben goes on to say that trees have the sense of taste, since they can
detect the saliva of the predator and react accordingly. Wohlleben then tries to identify other
senses in trees: “What about sounds? Let’s get back to hearing and speech” (Wohlleben, 2016,
p.12). He then goes on to explain an experiment: “Whenever the seedlings’ roots were exposed
to a crackling at 220 hertz, they oriented their tips in that direction. That means the grasses were
registering this frequency, so it makes sense to say they ‘heard’ it” (Wohlleben, 2016, p.13).
And so, Wohlleben tries to find any evidence that trees might have, like humans and animals
in general, five senses. However, the fact that trees have the capacity to send chemicals into the
air to “help” other trees is fascinating enough, there is thus, I believe, no need here to add that
this might be linked with our capacity to taste. It reduces trees to a similarity with humans,
while the act of sending chemicals is in fact something humans cannot do.

Nevertheless, Wohlleben’s attempt to find five sense in trees can also be seen as a way to show
his readers that trees are actually way more complex than what they tend to believe. an
alternatives to anthropocentrism are challenging to find. Moreover, to remove all
anthropocentrism from the study of animals or plants would lead to the opposite problem, called
“anthropodenial” by de Waal (Bruni, Perconti & Plebe, 2018, p.6). An unrestricted use of
anthropocentrism completely erases specificities of other species, but anthropodenial is as
problematic since it does not allow animals or plants any intelligence or agency. This same idea
is expressed in The Overstory by scientist Patricia Westerford:

We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing
looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let

27
 alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things.
(Powers, 2019, p.567).

The fact is that we might not have a better solution than anthropomorphism as a way of making
bonds with other species. Since “the feeling of empathy toward other animals is often driven
by an anthropomorphic stance …[,] human empathy is usually about vertebrates, especially
mammals, as they have similar physical features to human.” (Bruni, Perconti & Plebe, 2018,
p.4) Trees on the other hand look nothing like us, but if an author like Peter Wohlleben seeks
to make links with our human experience of life through anthropomorphic language, readers
might have more empathy for trees and relate to them. Marder warns that empathy towards
plants might mean erasing the plant specificity, since we are not able to understand what the
plant’s experience of the world is, and that we might end up projecting our own emotions and
systems of thought on it. However, as said earlier, anthropomorphism in this book is still mild,
and used for vulgarisation which serves the aim of reaching a large audience, in order to change
the world’s perception of trees as passive or uninteresting beings, and ultimately to have an
ethics which can protect plants better. Anthropocentrism’s speciesist way of negating what
makes a plant different from a human, could be seen, in our case, as a form of “strategic
essentialism”. The phrase was coined by Spivak and is defined as “a political tactic employed
by a minority group acting on the basis of a shared identity in the public arena in the interests
of unity during a struggle for equal rights.” (“Strategic Essentialism”, n.d.) In the end, even if
we agree that anthropocentrism denies some part of the plant’s being, this compromise with an
anthropocentric language can lead to a more sustainable relationship with plants.

6. Conclusion
This chapter has shown that the plant turn presents specific challenges, since the gap between
humans’ perception of life and that of trees is caused by a different mode of being and
functioning than humans and animals. Throughout this chapter, it has been demonstrated that
Peter Wohlleben tries in The Hidden Life of Trees to bring his tree characters to life through
different mechanisms such as a rhetoric of wonder at nature, but also a strong use of
anthropocentric language and the semantics of natural selection and mutual aid. Although the
use of anthropocentric language is strongly debated, it has been shown that Peter Wohlleben
primarily uses it to highlight trees and vulgarise science about trees in order to change our
perception of nature. A book trying to get rid of anthropocentrism altogether might not have as
much of an audience as The Hidden Life of Trees, and might thus not succeed in its goal of
28
changing humans’ behaviour toward nature. With this use of anthropocentric language,
Wohlleben manages to break the stereotype of the passive trees and creates empathy through
the anthropomorphic comparison. In the next chapter, the analysis of The Overstory shows
some similarities with The Hidden Life of Trees’ approach to trees and also reveals some other
literary mechanisms which show the interconnection of humans and trees.

29
 Chapter Two: The Overstory and the Maximalist Novel: Finding a
Balance Between Human and Tree Representation

You’re studying what makes some people take the

living world seriously when the only real thing for
everyone else is other people. You should be
studying everyone who thinks that only people
matter
—Richard Powers, The Overstory

After having analyzed a non-fiction book in the previous chapter, the analysis of The Overstory
(2019) by Richard Powers gives an opportunity to distinguish what a novel (here, an ecofiction),
does differently than a non-fiction work, especially when these two books share some
similarities. In fact, both books share the same rhetoric of wonder at nature: Peter Wohlleben
often comments on the beauty and complexity of the forest, and the characters of The Overstory
have some kind of mystical or animistic link with trees. After going through life-changing
events, most of the characters of The Overstory have a kinder relationship to trees, which echoes
with the kind of human-tree relationship Wohlleben pleads for in his book. But The Overstory
is more than The Hidden Life of Trees, in fact, it contains Peter Wohlleben’s non-fiction work.
In this ecofiction, a character named Patricia Westerford writes non-fiction books about trees
and her reflections on her writings strongly resembles Peter Wohlleben’s own project. She is a
scientist, who writes non-fiction books about trees, and is torn between her animistic
relationship with nature, and the academical code which does not allow her to write about her
intuitions about trees; she also uses anthropomorphic language in order to inform a broader
audience about trees through her books.

Yet, Patricia Westerford and the similarities with The Hidden Life of Trees is only a small part
of what is The Overstory. In fact, there are eight other characters in the novel, all of them
representing another angle on the matter of trees or issues related to them: art is represented by
the character called Nicholas Hoel, human psychology in green activism is addressed by the
story of Adam Appich; rights and law are dealt with through the character Ray Brinkman. The
novel is thus very rich in terms of the different takes its polyphonic structure allows. It is also
very varied in terms of the references cited throughout the narrative: the intertext is abundant
with citations and allusions to works of art, poetry and novels; to scientists and great thinkers;
to different mythologies and religions. It seems as if Powers’ novel is an attempt to make the

30
novel equal in terms of information as a non-fiction book or tries to mimic an encyclopedia.
The Overstory is a small world, almost an ecosystem, a balanced universe where there is a
representative of (almost) everything.

The length of the book, as well as its polyphonic aspect, the encyclopedic project and other
characteristics of The Overtsory which will be discussed further in this chapter, form together
the characteristics of the maximalist novel. The Overstory is a maximalist novel because it
contains many characters, is quite lengthy and also quotes or alludes to a varied ranged of works
and personalities. A maximalist novel is also structured by two opposite poles: “the cosmos-
function” and the “the chaos-function”. The characters come under the chaos-function and the
omniscient narrator which tells the story throughout is part of the cosmos-function. I believe
that these two opposite poles are also a way for the author to point out two different ways of
discussing the climate crisis. In this search for mechanisms which could bring trees closer in
our imaginary, it can also be noted that in The Overstory, the life of the human characters are
deeply entangled with that of trees, and it is done through the use of metaphors, but also by
more structural elements which will be defined later in this chapter. Finally, Patricia Westerford
is particularly interesting to study since her character reflects on the difficulties of writing non-
fiction about trees, the differences between the scientific community, the lay people who read
her books, and her dilemmas about vulgarization.

This chapter is structured as follows. The first part analyses in more detail the characteristics
of the maximalist novel and how The Overstory fits into this category, and also what it means
for an ecofiction to be a maximalist novel. In the following sections, I detail the opposition
between the narrator and the characters which is related to chaos/cosmos function of the
maximalist novel and used in this ecofiction to represent two “schools of throught” regarding
discourses around the climate crisis. Then the analysis is narrowed down on the literary
mechanisms used by Richard Powers to imagine a more connected way to live with trees and
more respectful attitudes towards these other beings. The final section focuses on the character
of Patricia Westerford, which concentrates many aspects of the novel and reflects on the
ecofiction and its challenges.

31
 1. The Maximalist Novel
Powers, with his “totalising” novel can be considered as a maximalist novel, according to the
characteristics identified by Stefano Ercolino in his study of this genre. Ercolino identifies ten
characteristics representative of the maximalist novel: “length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant
chorality, diegetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination,
inter-semiocity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism” (Ercolino, 2012, p.242). It is not the
aim of this chapter to determine if The Overstory is strictly speaking a maximalist novel by
analysing systematically how the novel fits in the different characteristics established by
Ercolino. However, Ercolino’s definition of the maximalist novel is helpful to identify to which
literary tradition Powers belongs, and what it reveals of his project. Some of the characteristics
do not really coincide: the “paranoid imagination” (which has to do with “hypothetical threats”,
conspiracies, etc.), and the hybrid realism (novels with grotesque characters, for example) do
not apply to The Overstory. Powers’ novel is not maximalist in the sense of The Crying of Lot
49 by Pynchon: the characters are not grotesque; the narration is not chaotic.

Overall, The Overstory corresponds to the other characteristics cited above. It is lengthy (625
pages) and undoubtedly holds an encyclopedic aspect. One salient aspect of The Overstory, as
said earlier, is in fact its rich intertext. References include names of personalities who have
dealt with trees in their works: poets like Whitman, Rumi; scientists like Muir; thinkers like
Thoreau; authors like Ovid. Mythological and religious characters like Cyparissus and Vishnu
are also cited. In addition to these names, there are references to titles of books about trees,
fiction or non-fiction, like The Lorax by Dr. Seuss and Peattie’s Natural Histories, and also
entire excerpts and quotations. These references serve to address trees through the lens of
different disciplines. Trees are a matter of biology and biodiversity and can thus raise scientific
questions such as “how do trees work?”, “what relationships do they have with other living
things?”, “what are the consequences of massive logging?”. Societal questions are also
addressed: “why do only a few of us act in the face of climate change?”, “why is the law not
protecting crucial elements of ecosystems like river and forests?”. All these intertextual
elements already give that totalising sense of the maximalist novel, since a world of reference
is contained in one novel.

Another maximalist characteristic is the “diegetic exuberance” which refers to the polyphonic
aspect of the story (several characters with their own voices and their own story), which makes
the narrative complex and intricate because it follows the lives of these nine characters

32
parallelly. Next, the “narratorial omniscience” serves, in this maximalist novel, to bring order
to the exuberance of the narrative. There is in fact a very intrusive omniscient narrator in The
Overstory, which highlights his knowledge about botany and other topics. The knowledge of
the narrator contrasts with the relative ignorance of the characters about technical terms about
trees and plants. Another characteristic is the “ethical commitment” which refers to novels
dealing with “themes of great historical, political, and social relevance” (Ercolino, 2012, p.252).
The Overstory fits this definition, since it deals with deforestation, but also with other historical
events in the background such as immigration, the Vietnam war or the Stanford prison
experiment.

Ercolino organises some of his 10 characteristics in an “internal dialectic” which is divided into
two opposed and complementary poles: the “chaos-function” and the “cosmos-function”
(Ercolino, 2012, p.250). “Length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, and diegetic
exuberance, on the one hand; completeness, narratorial omniscience, and paranoid imagination,
on the other” (Ercolino, 2012, p.250). The chaos-function is associated with anarchy, while the
cosmos-function orders the novel. “These antithetical forces guarantee the maximalist novel's
system-genre its delicate equilibrium, an equilibrium indispensable to its fundamental symbolic
need to represent the complexity of the world in which we live.” (Ercolino, 2012, p.251). This
balance is in fact something which can be noticed throughout the novel: there is a balance
between the omniscient knowledge of the narrator and the imperfect knowledge of the
characters; there is also balance in how trees and humans are represented; within the character
of Patricia Westerford, animistic beliefs and scientific rigour have equal importance. The
Overstory is a closed and complete world, where every character is supposed to represent a
facet of life, where the intertext seems almost exhaustive in terms of references about trees. The
association of the maximalist novel with the ecofiction novel allows ecofiction to have a certain
balance between a discourse that is perhaps too didactic (represented in the text by the
omniscient narrator and the extensive intertext) and a discourse that is too emotional/impulsive
(represented by the characters).

33
 2. The Omniscient Narrator and the Human Characters: a Balance Between
Facts and Emotions

In this opposition, the two poles can be seen as metaphors for two different reactions that our
society may have vis-à-vis the climate crisis: the omniscient narrator is the factual, scientific
approach to the world and climate change, while the characters are mainly driven by their
emotions.

The narrator comments on the events and shares his knowledge when he has the opportunity to
do so. He also draws the reader’s attention on the ignorance of the characters. He says for
example: “Staring at the bottom of the apple’s core, he realizes that the calyx – a word he’ll
never know in this life – is nothing less than the leftover bits of a withered appel flower”.
(Powers, 2018, p.312). The narrator clearly states his presence: he is narrating what the
character sees, but, as it seems, cannot help commenting on the character’s lack of knowledge
in botany; he specifies that the word he has just elicited, “calyx”, does not come from the
character Ray Brinkman (he does not know the term and will never know it), but from himself.
Had the narrator not mentioned it between dashes, the ignorance of the characters would have
remained unnoticed. The narrator seems to highlight a superiority of his, which is perhaps self-
evident for an omniscient narrator, often described as a presence which knows everything and
which is above the world of the characters. Nonetheless, this narrator emphasizes his superiority
more than a prototypical omniscient narrator, and by contrast, stresses the characters’
ignorance. The loss of authority that the novel has to face nowadays, in part due to the rise of
the new media (Dawson, 2009, p.150), is interestingly linked with the return of the omniscient
narrator in Paul Dawson’s article. Dawson argues that the omnsicient narrator is one “defense”
mecanism against this loss of influence power of the novel, and it is probably even more so in
the climate crisis context (Dawson, 2009, p.150).

This knowledgeable narrator stands in opposition with the characters. The fact that the narrator
emphasises his knowledge, and especially in botany, makes the reader re-think his own
knowledge in the light of the ignorance of the character. Linked to the many references and the
pedagogical or “preachy” aspect of the book that some have criticized (Sam Jordison, 2018a,
2018b), the narrator is an element – alongside with the rich intertext – which forces the reader
to assess what he knows about botany and trees. Even so, it is not because the narrator is
influencing the reader to see the characters as ignorant (in terms of botany and trees), that the
characters themselves do not have their own “power”. What leads them to defend what they
34
cherish – trees – is not knowledge – they do know vaguely what is happening – but what leads
them to take action is rather their emotions. Olivia is guided by “beings of light” that tell her
where to go and what to do; Nicolas Hoel is in love with Olivia and follows her; Douglas is
angry to realise that the company for which he plants apple trees is also responsible for
deforestation; Mimi is also angry because the trees behind her office reminded her of her father
and have been cut. One notices of course that the story does not end well for the green activists:
two of them go to prison for terrorism, two others go into hiding, and one dies.

The narrator and characters are however not only opposed poles, but could also be a metaphor
for a need of balance between scientific facts and emotions in communication about climate
change. One the one hand, scientific reports are based on facts and numbers which fail to
involve a broad audience. Roeser argues in Risk Communication, Public Engagement, and
Climate Change: A Role for Emotions (2012) that facts and numbers about climate change do
not affect people, mostly because the threat is distant in place or time. Instead, emotions can
trigger action more easily. Roeser says: “complex statistics can be replaced or supplemented
by understandable, gripping narratives” (Roeser, 2012, p.1036). The narrator, his scientific
knowledge and the learned aspect of The Overstory are balanced by the nine characters who
often act according to their emotions.

Nevertheless, the emotional reaction of the characters is not approved of, since the story of the
activists turns sour. The Overstory might be suggesting another take on the climate crisis, which
could be linked with Caren Irr’s article “Ecostoicism, or Notes on Franzen” (2018). Irr suggests
a new approach to the ecological crisis, i.e. ecostoicism, which she considers as an alternative
to several types of discourses that address the climate crisis, such as nihilism, apocalyptic
discourses or more “practical” views which promote activism. Ecostoicism is another option,
which acknowledges the climate crisis but accepts that complex ecological problems take time
to be “solved” and is against impulsive emotional reactions. This concept, says Caren Irr, can
be applied to various literary works and is quite malleable. Irr cites The Overstory as another
example of ecostoicism. The Overstory does have a tendency to underline the slow evolution
of time from the point of view of trees and to emphasize the vulnerability of humanity. Mystical
revelations and other moments of contemplation promote an interconnection between humans
and trees, and a more tender way of looking at one's environment.

35
 3. Human and Trees Interconnected
Powers uses many literary techniques to bring readers closer to trees, but not in one way as in
The Hidden Life of Trees, where trees are compared to humans but not the other way around.
Even if we mainly follow human characters, Powers seems to balance humans’ centrality in
stories and remind the reader that these human characters are embedded in a world of trees. The
first example of this is the structure of the book, which is separated in four sections, each named
after a particular part of a tree’s anatomy: “Roots”, “Trunk”, “Crown” and “Seeds”. The book,
it seems, is a tree in which the characters live. This is also embedded in some way in the fact
that the novel is made of paper which comes from a tree, so the characters can only be a part of
a tree. Moreover, each character is presented in the first part of the book, “Roots”, in distinct
chapters. Each character is linked in this first part of the novel to one tree: Nicholas Hoel is
linked to the chestnut tree planted by one of his ancestors; in Adam Appich’s family, a tree is
planted for every newborn, and Adam’s parents plant a Maple tree for him; Douglas Pavlicek’s
life is saved by a banyan tree after he falls off a plane during the Vietnam war; Neelay Metha
falls from an oak tree (“encinas”) and remains paralyzed after the accident. The characters
would not have had the same lives without these experiences. Some characters go through life-
changing events or near-death experiences, like Neelay Metha, but some just have a link with
a tree that is dear to them: Mimi Ma for example loves the mulberry tree of her father, and the
death of the tree comes as a loss; late in their lives Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly enjoy
determining which species grow in their garden. The religious themes of death and rebirth are
very important themes in The Overstory; many secondary characters die as if to underline the
ephemeral aspect of human lives. But characters are also reborn, such as Olivia Vandergriff
who is literally reborn after having been electrocuted and hears “beings of light” who tell her
what she should do. Other characters are reborn in other ways: Patricia Westerford wants to
commit suicide, but she decides not to in the last moment and after this decision her life
changes; Nicholas Hoel starts a new life when he meets Olivia; Adam Appich has a revelation
reading the fictional book The Ape Inside Us. These revelations in their lives will intensify their
already existing links with nature and they will all become active in the protection of trees at
different levels: five characters are green activists which occupy land to stop deforestation
(Olivia, Nicholas, Mimi, Douglas and Adam), Patricia writes non-fiction books and collects
seeds of trees around the world, Neelay develops the complexity of the flora of his video games;
Ray and Dorothy refuse to prune the vegetation in their garden and to mow the lawn.

36
The level of the narrative is not the only one where the characters are linked to trees. The level
of the sentence also shows some close association between humans and trees. In the previous
chapter, the anthropomorphic language was the main literary mechanism used in The Hidden
Life of Trees to make trees look more like humans and thus make them more interesting. Trees
are in The Overstory sometimes anthropomorphized: “The seeds are humming. They’re singing
something - she’d swear it - just below earshot.” (Powers, 2019, p.486) But humans are also
vegetalised: some metaphors such as the ones below compare humans to trees/plants and not
the other way around:

Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself
at the core and the present floating outward all along the outermost ring (Powers, 2019, p.43)

Meaning drains from her like green from a maple in fall (Powers, 2019, p.127)

All her flowers have long since faded. But here's the bee (Powers, 2019, p.143)

Clumsy and green, they peel back the shields of clothing. Ten minutes later, she’s turned into a
tree just a little too late to be spared” (Powers, 2019, p.152)

4. Patricia Westeford
Patricia Westerford is the figure of the author within the character world. Being embodied
(partly) in one character allows the author to conduct a metafictional discourse, namely, on
writing about trees in the climate crisis era. Patricia Westerford is not only a scientitst, but is
also a non-fiction writer – she publishes two books about trees in her life. It can be noticed that
her books put her in a position of authority: she is called to court to testify about trees’
importance, and is also a public figure giving conferences. Her books give trees more visibility,
but she also has to lie, transform or vulgarize what she knows to reach a greater audience. Fom
the beginning of her chapter, in the section “Roots”, Patricia is already associated to the author:
she is described as the “guiding spirit of a kingdom” (Powers, 2019:141). A kindgom composed
of her dolls, made of materials found in her garden, like acorns and pinecones. Like an author
who gives life to their characters, Patricia gives life to her handmade beings.

Other characters also have features of the author, or also contain in their stories metafictional
reflections about trees in literature; Powers acknowledged in an interview with the Guardian

37
that he created “several characters all of whom have a claim to being my alter ego” (Preston,
2019). Nicholas Hoel shares with the author a journey in the field of art and Neelay Metha an
interest for computers, etc. (Preston, 2019). Later passages concerning Neelay’s computer game
company also contain metafictional comments. He is not writing a book, but his game is a work
of fiction which tries to include trees and nature in general in a very complex and realistic way.
When Neelay tries to add more complexity in the fictive flaura of his game, his colleagues react
negatively:

No more plants, boss. You can’t make a game out of plants. Unless you give them bazookas.
(Powers, 2019, p.515)
And:
How…? Nguyen says. “How are the limits and shortages and permadeath going to be fun?
(Powers, 2019, p.516)

These excerpts demonstrate the difficulty of associating entertainment and crucial topics such
as climate change. It also shows the difficulty to associate action and other mainstream
mecanisms to make a story or a game about trees gripping, since they live in a completely
different temporality than humans.

Patricia’s relation to trees is a mix of intuition and observation. She starts with animism – “a
conception that grants to living beings and things a soul equal to human beings15” (Larousse,
n.d.) – in the beginning of her life. Patricia’s father is also a source of knowledge for her. She
does not go to school, but follows her father, who is an ag extension agent, and who gives
information to farmers on how to manage their farms in the most effective way. We see how
the educational, pedagogical and vulgarizational aspects – associated to the author’s project –
are a recurrent motive in the story of Patricia. On the way to the multiple farms, her father tells
her the wonder of nature, and Patricia listens, fascinated. He makes up an experiment for her to
understand what makes trees grow. He also offers her an abridged version of The
Metamorphosis by Ovid, which is again another way to adapt knowledge. From a more intuitive
approach to nature – she felt an animistic or intuitive idea of nature’s life and beauty – she gains

15
Conception générale qui attribue aux êtres de l'univers, aux choses, une âme analogue à l'âme humaine.
(Larousse, n.d., my translation)

38
a rather empirical approach, experimenting in order to understand the world of plants. As said
in The Overstory “acorn animism turns into its offspring, botany”, marking a passage from
belief to science, but also emphasizing the link between the two, that is, botany having its origin
in animism (science needing a start in an intuition of nature’s complexity and value). Later in
her life, the narrator tells: “she doesn’t know yet how the system works. She knows it’s rich
and beautiful” (Powers, 2019:157). She first approaches the world through intuition, later
confronting it through rational experiments. She never forgets her animism beliefs: towards the
end of The Overstory, she says that the people of Achuar, with such an animistic way of
thinking, can save the world.

In her first book however, and even more so in conferences, she cannot refer to her intuitions,
and has to keep to verified facts. She has difficulties in her first book to write the whole truth:
“More trouble than she has the heart to tell readers of her little book. Trouble, like the
atmosphere, flows everywhere, in currents beyond the power of humans to predict” (Powers,
2019, p.275). She also tries to make the picture more beautiful and uses anthropomorphic
language to characterise trees: she names a type of tree “the giving trees” (Powers, 2019, p.276).
She explains that “the public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible”
(Powers, 2019, p.276), because humans can relate to the word “giving”, which makes them
think of a generous person. She changes the title of her first book: from “How Trees Will Save
the World” to “Forest Salvation”, because it creates a confusion and the reader will not know
if humans will save trees or the other way round (Powers, 2019, p.277), which echoes the
overall balance of The Overstory, where trees and humans mutually influence each other. As
explained in chapter one, Patricia Westerford also indirectly introduces the concept of
antropodenial. She tries to keep to facts in her books and conferences so as not to be defamed
by the scientific community, but she still uses some anthropomorphic images to give trees more
agency than what the scientific community allows them to have. On the one side, Patricia is
trying in her book to make people less anthropocentric, make them concerned about other living
beings that are the trees, and at the same time, she tries to use anthropocentrism as some kind
of spectacles that can not only be used to analyse humans but also can also be used to look at
trees (trees, for example, also have the capacity to communicate). This joins Anna Tsing’s
statement that we have refused in the past to see the sociality of non-human beings (Tsing,
2013).

39
In her second book, Patricia explains her journey collecting seeds for the Seedbed bank. The
seed bank was created by Patricia to identify and conserve species of trees all around the world
that might soon disappear. While writing her second book, she reflects about her first book,
which is in retrospect more hopeful and composed in a moment when the planet was still
healthy. Her second book is indeed “a little more bleak” (Powers, 2019, p.529), in it, she admits
people’s failure to see trees for what they are:

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or
pretty fall foliage ... Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to
crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible. (Powers, 2019, p.529)

Her journey for the Seedbed bank through “all the continents but Antartica” only saves “a few
seeds from a few thousand trees, a fraction of the species that will vanish as the Earth’s current
custodians watch, bringing countless dependents down with them” (Powers, 2019, p.530). She
tries to keep some hope in her book: “She describes all the trees that are already marching north
at rates that astonish those who measure them” (Powers, 2019, p.530), but the reader can feel
that human beings are doomned for her. The final sentences of the book says that the seeds lie
in the seed bank “until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground.” (Powers,
2019, p.531) She adds in the last minute: “If not, other experiments will go on running
themselves, long after people are gone” (Powers, 2019, p.531). The idea that she looses hope
in humanity can also be sensed at the moment when she commits suicide, as a way to answer
the question asked to her: “what is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?”
(Powers, 2019, p.570).

In the last passage in which Patricia appears, she commits suicide in front of an assembly. If
we make the parallel with the time she was called to court to testify about the importance of
trees, we can see that in the two accounts, she explains the facts behind climate change and
deforestation. In the first account, she is constantly restraining herself: “she fights off personal
hunch and keeps to what scientific community agrees on” (Powers, 2019, p.351). In the second
one, she also gives a talk with powerpoints etc., but she decides to make a public suicide. This
finds a parallel in a recent short movie called “#Anita” that was shot by Le Biais Vert, where
the character reacts in the same way. Anita is the image of Greta Thunberg in a near future. She
realises that governments and assemblies only invite her for their image, and that her speeches
are not having any effect. As a last choice she decides to commit suicide in front of an assembly.

40
However, the short movie does not finish with the tragedy, but adds an ironic close-up of
somebody’s hand, scrolling the Facebook feed, liking the publication of Anita’s sucide, and
right after that, liking a publication showing a cute dog. In a similar way, The Overstory does
not end with Patricia’s suicide, but the narrative just continues its way. Anita and Patricia are
two characters who are invited to raise awareness about climate change, and they both underline
the urgency of the problem. Still, they are not listened to, and this perhaps shows the difficulty
of an effective communication about climate change, as demonstrated by Roeser.

In the end, Patricia Westerford is a person and an author torn between her intuition, her feelings
for nature that come from her animistic belief; and the desire to reach as many readers as
possible, or in case of a talk, to convince the audience. For that purpose, she adapts what she
knows so that humans relate better to trees (the giving trees ressemble a generous person), in
the same way Powers concentrate all he has learned in a novel with interesting characters and
a gripping narrative.

5. Conclusion
This chapter aimed to analyse how Powers had constructed an ecofiction like The Overstory. I
also wanted to address the metafictional reflections on ecofiction within the novel and see how
the author manages to show a balanced human-tree relationship in his novel. I have delt with
the notion of “maximalist novel” to describe how Powers uses most of its characteristics to
make a coherent and convincing ecofiction balanced between two poles, and how these poles
(characters and omniscient narrator) represent different takes on the climate crisis, and that
perhaps a balance is to be found between these two poles, in what Caren Irr calls ecostoicism.
Powers also puts into perspective anthropocentrism by closely interconnecting the lives of trees
and humans in the novel. In the last section, the metafictional aspects of the story of Patricia
Westerford have been analysed, and it has been identified that here too there is an attempt to
find a balance, between an intuitive vision of nature and a scientific one, while trying to attract
the broader audience with the use of anthropomorphism. These elements converge in a picture
that contains many issues raised by the ecofiction. The Overstory is a reflection on the
ecofictions (Patricia Westerford), but also a convinving story which combines polyphony
(characters) and strong stands (omnsicient narrator). Powers achieves a well balanced novel

41
that also opens up new discussions about the ecofiction novel through his metafictional
reflections.

In the next chapter, Barkskins addresses the issue of the representation of trees in a way that is
almost the opposite of The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees, since it does not try to make
trees dearer to the readers. Rather, it attempts to show the consequences of capitalism and the
capitalocene on the forests of the world and on ethnic minorities.

42
 Chapter Three: Naturalism and the Capitalocene in Barkskins

Someone once wondered why it is that if a work of

Man is destroyed, it is called vandalism, but if a
work of nature, of God, is destroyed it is so often
called progress
—Jane Goodall, Seeds of Hope

In the previous chapter, The Overstory has been characterised as a novel which seeks a balance
in both how the climate crisis is addressed, and in the representations of trees and humans.
Within the structure of his novel, Powers tried to connect humans with trees so that they could
not be taken as separate entities. Barkskins, in terms of literary strategy, is entirely different;
like the two other novels, it tries to decentre humans but does so in a more radical way than
Wohlleben’s and Powers’ books. Paradoxically, even if the novel is more posthuman than the
other two works of the corpus, trees are not put forward in the novel, even though deforestation
is a central theme of it. However, Barkskins shares with The Overstory its length and its
“totalising” aspect, in the sense that it covers in detail three hundred years of history (from the
1693 to 2013) and that the many characters move all around the globe. Whereas The Overstory
seeks to be encyclopedic by including citations and references from various backgrounds,
Barkskins is also an extensive novel: not for the sake of being encyclopedic but for
documenting, from a historical perspective, how capitalism emerged and evolved in history. In
The Overstory, the nine characters, even if they are deeply entangled with the lives of trees, still
have quite defined personalities and take considerable space in the novel. The Hidden Life of
Trees is solely about trees, but a human presence is quite strong through the use of
anthropomorphic language. Annie Proulx however choses a detached perspective on the world
of the characters, but also risks losing the readers since the characters die abruptly and rapidly
after being introduced in the novel.

Barkskins is mainly set in North America (Canada and USA) and most of the characters of the
novel stem from two families: the Sels and the Dukes. These families were founded by two
Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Dukes, who journeyed to New France/Canada in order to
make a living there. Both families take part in the deforestation of North America: the Dukes
create the lumber company “Duke and Sons”, and the Sels work as woodcutters in lumber
camps. Apart from their different social status the Dukes and Sels also have distinct racial
identities: René married a Mi’kmaq woman named Mari, and his children are hence half-
43
European, half-Mi’kmaq, but are considered by the rest of the society as Natives; the Dukes are
white people. The two families work as opposite poles in the novel, and are almost
stereotypically reduced to “the good ones” (the Sels, poor workers with good values) and “the
bad ones” (the Dukes, careless capitalists), or, one could say, as prey and predators.

This latter Darwinian opposition is characteristic of naturalistic novels like Barkskins. The
novel in fact is quite deterministic: since there are plenty of characters in this novel, they lack
distinctive personalities and are rather flat; unlike in a traditional novel, the characters are
erased from the foreground. The frame, encompassing three hundred years of history, creates a
“zooming out” effect, which also puts into perspective the relative importance of the human
characters. Another characteristic of the naturalistic novel is the use of repetitions to emphasise
the lineage between the characters, and Annie Proulx makes abundant use of that method,
especially for the Sels family members. In the Sel family, the men are all woodcutters, the
fathers often abandon their families in a way or another, and most of the Sels are nostalgic for
the past. Like the trees of the novel, the Sels are not entirely distinctive. This lack of individual
characterisation emphasises common traits and the group. The absence of characterisation for
the Native characters and the absence of description for the forests of America links the two
entities together to highlight the similar fate of decimation both have to face.

This destruction and lack of characterisation of the Natives and the forest is not gratuitous. The
very act of erasing the Native characters and the forests reflects how capitalism, embodied by
the Duke family, considers these two entities. The historian Jason Moore explains in “The
Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis” (2017), how the
conceptual opposition “Humanity/Nature” (on the base of an already existing Cartesian
dualism) was created by capitalism. In this pair, Nature stands for non-human beings (animals
and the vegetal world) but also all human minorities (women, Blacks, Native Americans, etc.).
Moore explains that, since a majority of humans could be treated as non-humans, it “allowed
capitals and empires to treat them cheaply – even as this cheapening was fiercely resisted”
(Moore, 2017, p.7), and thus to have cheap workforce to build a capitalist society. According
to this theory, the Sels, as Native Americans, are classified in the category of “Nature” along
with trees and forests. Moore further explains that because their work was “cheapened”, due to
their new status of natural things, it made their work “invisible, or nearly so” (Moore, 2017,
p.7), which fits the idea of a common fate and the lack of characterisation of both entities
identified above.

44
The way Barkskins represents Natives and forests imitates how capitalism actually treats nature
and minorities, but the novel is also set in a broader frame – that of three hundred years of
history – which enables the reader to zoom out on all the characters. Rather than just being a
way of dehumanizing the characters, it enables the reader to have a broader perspective on the
current climate crisis, in a less emotional way. The end of Barkskins also suggests more nuances
than what seems like very binary in the beginning of the novel with the Duke-Sel opposition.
In fact, the characters who set to reforest the country at the end of the novel all stem from the
union of Kuntaw Sel and Beatrix Duke, thus mixing the two families. A speech given by
Kuntaw to his community emphasises hybridity and solutions rather than a hopeless wish to go
back to olden days. The project of reforestation itself, even if happening in a time without much
hope, shows that the Sels were finally able to adapt in their disappearing world and lead a
project that aims at the future.

This analysis is structured as follows. First, the characteristics of the naturalistic novel and its
effect on the characters in the novel will be analysed. Second, the Natives and their
representation in the book will be examined, paying particular attention on the repetitive
patterns in their lives. Third, the descriptions of forests in Barkskins and the evolution of
mentalities around them will be studied. Finally, the link between the forests and the Natives
will be restated, and it will be demonstrated how Annie Proulx comes from a binary story to a
more complex one, which emphasises hybridity, and the power to change within a damaged
world.

1. The Naturalistic Novel

As a consequence of the time span covered in the novel (from 1693 to 2013), many characters
populate Barkskins. Even if the novel is lengthy in terms of pages (713 pages), most of the
characters have a small allotted part of the book, which implies that their lives seem very short.
In the most extreme cases, characters can appear for the first time in the novel and die within
the same sentence (De Bruyn, 2016, p.88). Subsequently, it is also difficult to develop distinct
personalities in the characters within the same family (the two families are of course quite
distinct), since related members of one family experiences similar events and issues. These flat
characters are perhaps a consequence of the naturalistic frame of the novel. As argued in “The
New Naturalism: Cormac McCarthy, Frank Norris, and the Question of Postmodernism” the

45
deterministic aspect of naturalism, and thus the lack of the free will of the characters, has for
consequence that the characters “are often flat, stereotypical, or passive” (Clarke, 2014, p.54).
Although both families have flat characters, I would like to already note here that the Sels are
more prone to resemblance that the Dukes among themselves, as will be analysed later.

In addition to being flat, the characters are often “discarded” in the course of the novel; violent
and/or unforeseen deaths16 happen in the course of the narrative. The deaths are either atrocious,
or totally fortuitous; they catch both the reader and the characters unprepared. By their untimely
deaths, it can be argued that the characters are disposed of, as if the writer, or a superior force,
suddenly decided than one character was not useful to the machinery of history anymore. The
narrator, a third-person distant instance as often in naturalistic novels (Clarke, 2014, p.56) is
not really involved, and is quite different from the very intrusive narrator in The Overstory.
Here, it is rather descriptive and neutral towards what the characters experience. This
“destruction” of the characters mirrors other destructions (the deforestation of North America,
the destructive force of the Duke or capitalism in general, and the destruction of Native
Americans through diseases and discrimination) and makes destruction a major theme in
Barkskins.

This violent aspect of the novel is also naturalism’s heritage, which often depicts a “hostile
nature” (Bilton, 2002, p.177), and tries to prove that humans’ nature is inherently violent. In
this assumption that humans are intrinsically brutal, naturalism follows Darwin’s theory that
man is an animal (Bilton, 2002, p.172). The distinction “human-animal” no longer exists in
naturalistic writing (Clarke, 2014, p.55). This is mirrored in Barkskins by the use of
comparisons, such as “breed[ing] like mice” (Proulx, 2017, p.213) “like spring geese heading
north” (Proulx, 2017, p.469) which are analysed in Learning to Be a Species in the
Anthropocene, and while these can in fact be pejorative and support the naturalistic vision, De
Bruyn considers that these “level rather than erect hierarchies […] and are applied to the
powerful rather than the powerless” (De Bruyn, 2016, p.85). Although the naturalistic
opposition of the Dukes and Sels as predators and victims suggests an extremely essentialist
idea of inequalities, it may be argued that Proulx compensates this with other mechanisms such
as these comparisons and leads the reader’s sympathy more towards the Sels than the Dukes.

16
Unforeseen and sudden deaths often occur in The Overstory as well, but as a way to bring us back to our
condition of mortal human beings, and to compare humans’ life span to that of trees, which can live for centuries.
These also occur in The Hidden Life of Trees, in a way to emphasise the struggle for life that trees experience.
46
Nevertheless, the tone of the novel is rather bleak but also sarcastic, as if these lives were, in
the end, not much in the face of the relentless march of history, or of the capitalist system. As
said in the introduction, the novel “zooms out” to give the reader a broader and perhaps less
emotional perspective, which could be linked with Caren Irr’s argument on Ecoistoicism,
explained in chapter two. In the case of Barkskins, it could be said that the “zooming out effect”
can work in an ecostoicist way for the reader, who can grasp the complexity of the problem
after reading the novel.

Characters are thus not the main focus of this novel. In fact, another characteristic of the
naturalistic novel is the “reversal of foreground and background” (Bilton, 2002, p.172), where
the characters, usually in the foreground, move to the background. Since literary naturalism
considers that “the environment determines the individual” (Bilton, 2002, p.172), the
environment moves to the foreground. In a similar way, Barkskins shifts the focus from the
characters (by making them flat, and discarding them) to what they have in common: for the
Sels, that means not dwelling on the specificities of each character, but rather show what is
similar in their lives, such as the injustice that all Sels members have to face due to their racial
identity. However, individuals do matter to a certain extent, as will be seen in a later part of the
analysis. For now, my analysis focuses on how the characters are described at the time of their
death and how the novel emphasizes the similarities between characters of a same family.
René’s life is commented upon at the time of his death:

Ends come to everyone, even woodcutters. All his life René was a défricheur, un bûcheron or,
as the ancient book put it, “a woodsman, a forester, a forest owner; an ax owner, a feller of trees,
a woodcutter, a user of the ax. He cuts with an ax; he fells trees — cuts them, tops them, strips
them, splits them, stacks them.” His life was spent in severe toil, stinging sweat running in his
eyes, bitten by insects of the hot woods, the callused hands shaping into a permanent curl to fit
ax handles, the bruises and blood, the constant smoke of burning trees, the pain of unremitting
labor, the awkward saw, treacherous saplings used as pry bars, fitting new handles on broken
spades and the everlasting lifting of great vicious tree trunks.

But Achille, his eleven-year-old son, found him dead on his knees in the forest, his knotted
hands clenched on the ax handle, the bit sunk into a cedar, René dead at forty from a chop to
his neck. A sharp scalping knife had been set above and parallel with his eyebrows and drawn
around the circumference of his head, the scalp peeled off and carried away to be redeemed for

47
 the bounty. He was, until the end, a skillful woodsman, his life and body shaped to the pleasure
of the ax. And so his sons and grandsons after him. (Proulx, 2017, p.58)

The narrator chiefly identifies René as a woodcutter (and not as a father, a husband, or a human
being for example), using repetitions and enumerations to emphasize the importance or
predominance of his work in his life, and perhaps also to give a hammering sensation that is
coupled to the harsh aspect of the work. The narrator also establishes a link between René’s
vocation and his descendants: “and so his sons and grandsons after him”. The reader is notified
that a pattern will be followed with the other characters and will be able to verify that most Sel
men will become woodcutters in camps. In fact, Barkskins shows little improvement of the
living conditions of the Natives. It can also be noted that, even if at first René is reluctant to
clearing the forest around the land, in the end, “his life and body [were] shaped to the pleasure
of the ax”. This sense of satisfaction for the hard work is also found throughout the book: almost
all the Sel men will be employed in lumber camps, and even though the conditions are harsh,
they enjoy their job.

René is not only murdered; his death is described in minute detail. This is typical of Proulx’s
writing: she adds to her realism a taste for gore (Bilton, 2002, p.177). The mention of his son
finding him dead is also the beginning of a movement linking all the fathers and sons of the Sel
family: the trauma of losing one’s parent is consistent throughout Barkskins, on the Sel side,
and forms another repeated motive. Many times, as we will see, the fathers in the Sel lineage
will leave their sons, for different reasons. If this happened in one of the characters’ life, it
would be considered as anecdotal. But since this is almost systematically repeated, it is
considerably more meaningful, it adds a weight to the story. The past faults are repeated, the
characters do not manage to withdraw themselves from their fate.

Similarly, the mistreatment of the Sel women is also regularly repeated. They are mostly used
for the pleasure of men or killed. Their presence as individuals is even more erased than that of
the Sel men. For instance, Mari is used as a concubine by Trépagny (the man who employs
René and Charles Duquet when they arrive in Wobik), and then forced to marry René. Their
daughter Noé is raped and bears the child of her rapist. Achille (son of René and Mari, brother
of Zoé) sees his wife dead and dismembered when he comes back from a hunt. Malaan, wife of
Kuntaw (grandson of René, son of Achille), finds refuge in the Post and also serves as a
concubine because Kuntaw abandoned her when he left to find his father. Tonny, the son of
Kuntaw and Malaan, marries Hannah, but she is soon used as a concubine by white men at the

48
same post, and she is killed by one of these men. Elise (daughter of Tonny and Hannah) is
married to a poor and alcoholic Indian who abuses her.

In literary naturalism, repetitions are a common method to show lineage between the characters
(Cabanès, 1993, p.99). In Barkskins these repetitions occur, for instance, in physiological
descriptions of the characters. For example, Achille has the same smile as his mother Mari
(Proulx, 2017, p.161). More importantly, as has been shown in the previous paragraphs, the
repetitions occur in the events of the life of one family (e.g. Sel fathers abandoning their
families, Sel women abused and/or killed, Sel men working as woodcutters). Because of these
repetitions, Cabanès argues that the characters “are never entirely one. They are a link in a
physiological chain, the elements of a community. The existence of the protagonists in a novel
is always dependant on a ‘before’ that often foreshadows an ‘again’17” (Cabanès, 1993, p.98).
Commenting on the novel I Malavoglia by Verga, Cabanès explains that the repeated desire of
the characters to free themselves from their condition shows the entrapment of the characters
(Cabanès, 1993, p.101). This repeated desire creates a “horizon of expectation18” (Cabanès,
1993, p.101) which allows the reader to confirm if that horizon is met at some point of the
novel. In Barkskins, after having repeatedly observed that fathers abandon their families, the
reader is able to notice that one generation does not really learn from another. Cabanès also
underlines the dehumanizing effect of these repetitions : “the constant return of similar elements
becomes a sign of alienation: it is a way to dismantle characters and to make them as anonymous
as in a crowd, to make them part of a collective voice 19 ” (Cabanès, 1993, p.103). These
repetitions concern more the Sels than the Dukes, since the naturalistic novel tends to focus on
the marginalized and the poor. Even if the Duke characters resemble their ancestor, the
repetitions concern the Sel characters more importantly. The aim is to show how the Sel
characters are entrapped in a society where Native Americans are discriminated, how the
capitalistic system represented by the Duke family is imposed on the Native Americans and
how it is difficult to escape these inequalities. The Duke men rule the society and are powerful
enough to take decisions and shape their lives. Therefore, they are not entrapped in the circle
of repetitions. The Duke are in the “Humanity” part of the Nature/Humanity distinction created

17
“Il apparaît ainsi que les personnages ne sont jamais entièrement clos sur eux-mêmes. Ils sont les maillons
d'une chaîne physiologique, les éléments d'une collectivité. L'existence des héros de roman est en effet toujours
tributaire d'un « avant » qui préfigure bien souvent un « encore » ”. (Cabanès, 1993, p.98, my translation)
18
Horizon d’attente (Cabanès, 1993, p.101, my translation)
19
“l'éternel retour du semblable devient signe d'une aliénation, manière de déconstruire le personnage, de le
faire disparaître dans l'anonymat d'une foule, d'une voix collective ”. (Cabanès, 1993, p.103, my translation)
49
by capitalism, as explained by Jason Moore. The Dukes enrich themselves with the cheap
labour of the Natives, who are not considered as humans.

To finish this section explaining the determinism in the characters’ lives and their relative
unimportance as individuals, it should also be mentioned that even during their lives, characters
feel that they have to face forces stronger than their will, such as Noë who regrets having
moved, and did not expect her life to take such a turn:

She had not thought to live far from René and Mari’s house, and now they were near the ocean.
She had not thought to be pregnant and now she had a kid. “All this happened because of
Theotiste and Elphège had brought them to Mi’kma’ki, the land of memory”. (Proulx, 2017,
p.156)

Having said that, Noë regrets having moved and is conscious of what happened to her. Even if
this is a strongly deterministic novel, characters do reflect about their condition. As argued by
Bilton, Annie Proulx is not strictly a naturalistic author in the sense that her characters “are
anything but specimens in a laboratory, and her stories lack any kind of didactic purpose, or
any heavy-handed warning of social degeneration or social atavism” (Bilton, 2002, p.178). In
fact, Bilton demonstrates that the main characters in two of Proulx’s novels, The Shipping News
and Postcards, progressively turn into better persons. In Barkskins, the reader can barely see
characters evolve, considering the short span of their life, and even through generations it can
hardly be said that their condition improves, or that they do not repeat past mistakes. But the
novel and the Duke/Sel opposition is complexified towards the end of the book, which can be
seen, for instance, through the union of Kuntaw Sel and Beatrix Duke. Lavinia Duke is another
example: as she has to struggle as a woman to find a place in the company of her father, she
has the sympathy of the reader (De Bruyn, 2016, p.79) even though she has the same capitalist
ideas as her ancestors.

In this first part, the naturalistic aspects of Barkskins have been exposed: determinism, violence,
a grim tone, flat characters, many repetitions which show lineage. Annie Proulx’s insistence on
repetitions is not entirely gratuitous. Naturalism can be considered as showing “a lack of
humane sympathy, of a nihilistic stress on ugliness for its own sake” (Bilton, 2002, p.178), but
Proulx’s naturalism “lacks the lofty scientific distance” (Bilton, 2002, p.178) of classic novels
of the genre. Her insistence on repetitions, more than emphasizing determinism, allows the

50
reader to witness the grip of capitalism on the lives of the marginalized and the poor. The
realism of the novel can be debated; Proulx’s tendency to gore scenes exaggerates realism at
times and repetitions in the lives of the Sel are quite emphasized. Nevertheless, Proulx’s novel
is realistic and depicts Natives and North American forests in the same “flat” way in order to
reflect what are forests and Natives in capitalism’s eyes. One of the characters invited to
Lavinia’s business dinner talks about “the will of the people” and the narrator notes: “he meant
the will of white people, for another of his banners was that ‘the Constitution was made by
whites for whites.’ After all, who else was there?” (Proulx, 2017, p.531).This last comment
summarizes the stance of the white capitalists in the novel. Forests are treated likewise: Charlie,
son of Lavinia and Duke Breitsprecher, has taken an opposite path to that of his parents, and
left to South America to study tropical forests. He writes in a notebook:

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, nor insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to
men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it –
even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what
will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species
and I am sorry I am one of them (Proulx, 2017, p.658).

2. Imagination and the Natives

Since they are discriminated and would rather live in the past, the Sels have to live in in their
imagination. The first Native character the reader meets is Mari, a woman who is the servant
of Trépagny and will become René’s wife. She lives away from her original place, and from
the beginning of the novel, Natives are thus entrapped in the colonial system. Mari remains
deeply influenced by her childhood memories and lives according to her upbringing and
traditions. She neglects for instance the garden which Trépagny has assigned her to tend, since
she has been taught to set eels traps, or gather wild medicinal plants, but not to garden. She
passes on the oral tradition of her people to her children; she describes her original place as an
ideal location. However, the place where Mari lived with other Mi’kmaq people before is not
ideal (a harsh place in the winter) and the children of Mari therefore have a false idea of that
place in their minds. After the death of their parents and the theft of their property by
Renardette, the children of Mari and René try to settle in the community where their mother
used to live, only to find that the place is far from a heaven. Elphège wonders “if it had been a
mistake to fill their heads with stories of a summer world” (Proulx, 2017, p.169). Achille,

51
remembering the tales of Indians chasing whales, tries to capture one himself, but fails. From
the start, the Sel brothers and sisters try to go back to their origins but fail to do so. They
compare the stories they have been told – imaginary stories, or stories that belong to the past –
to the reality and their present and are, therefore, systematically disappointed. The idea that,
confronted to the disappearance of their world, Natives have to keep their values and their
original lifestyle is often repeated in in Barkskins. Sosep, an old Mi’kmaq man which the
children of René meet in Odanak after their theft of property, gives a speech to his community.
The speech is representative of the internal debates in their community:

[...] “All these woods once ours,” he said, “and we went anywhere we wished without
hindrance. That time has passed. but I wish to tell you that if we Mi’kmaw people are to survive
we must constantly hold to the thoughts of Mi’kmaw ways in our minds. We will live in two
worlds. We must keep our Mi’kmaw world - where we, the plants, animals and birds are all
persons together who help each other together - fresh in our thoughts and lives.
[…]
Noë muttered to Zoë, “Does he mean we must give up metal pots and go back to boiling food
with hot rocks in a hollow wood pot as Loze said they did in the old days?”
Sosep had not heard this and continued. “If we had not harmed so many animal beings they
would fight with us against the outsiders. Especially the beaver.
[…]
Achille told himself he would live the Mi’kmaw way , imagining all was well. He would take a
wife and he would tell his children that they, too, must imagine that they lived in a Mi’kmaw
world though it was ceasing to exist. They must remember how that life had been, not how it
had become. (Proulx, 2017, p.181)

A first thing to note is the discourse around the change of their society. Old Sosep acknowledges
that the time when Indians lived in harmony with nature has passed; even if they wanted to
come back to olden days, they would not be able to. Amongst other reasons, white men easily
outnumber them. They know that their power of influence on the world is low and therefore
seek refuge in their imagination. Natives resist change, but the world cannot help but change:
for instance, the tale of a Mi’kmaq man drinking in a saucer and being killed for not respecting
traditional ways, serves to show how “everything […] change[s]” (Proulx, 2017, p.172) because
soon after the murder, other Mi’kmaq will possess saucers and nobody is killed for that. In the
same way, Noë wonders if they will have to give up the comfort of metal pots, something they
grew up with, and which is, even if not part of original traditions, a part of their lives. The fact

52
of “living in two worlds” might indicate a link with W.E.B. Du Bois and the concept of “double
consciousness”, i.e. the difficulty to accommodate two identities: the “original Native” identity,
and the one acquired after colonisation, where metal pots, for example, are part of their lives.
They not only wish to go back to days when the community was not threatened, but they also
wish to keep what has improved their lives. The Sel brothers and sisters come from this hybrid
background of a Mi’kmaq mother and a French father and are thus initially concerned by this
“double consciousness”.

Another important element is animism: because the Indians massively hunted the beavers to
trade with the Europeans, they think it is partly the cause of their downfall. Loze, a woman the
Sel brother and sisters meet in Odanak, says something similar: “Because our fathers killed so
many beavers to trade with the Europeans the beaver are angry and have left the country, and
now strike us with illnesses” (Proulx, 2017, p.174). Their community do not think of beavers
as an almost extinct species, but they find reasons in their attitude towards animals to explain
the disappearance of beavers. As a consequence, the culture of the Natives disappears at the
same time the beavers go extinct: “Yes, the beaver had become some kind of whiteman money
and the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave had fallen away” (Proulx, 2017, p.171).
Because the beavers disappear, the customs of the Indians can no longer remain the same.
Ursula Heise demonstrates in Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings Of Endangered
Species how “extinction narratives” connect the disappearance of a species with the loss of a
part of the society’s identity and culture:

In literary, visual, and musical representations of extinction, biological crisis typically becomes
a proxy for cultural concerns: worries about the future of nature, on one hand, and on the other
hand, hopes that a part of one’s national identity and culture might be preserved, revived, or
changed for the better if an endangered species could be allowed to survive or an extinct one
could be rediscovered. (Heise, 2016, p.49).

Moreover, the word “imagine” is also key to understand the Sel. Achille has to imagine he lives
in the same conditions as his ancestors, with resources aplenty around him. However, since it
is not the case, Mi’kmaq are denying the situation they are in and this only brings more despair.
In fact, it takes “hours, even days to find many once-common things” (Proulx, 2017, p.180) to
the point that Achille “somehow lo[ses] the respect of the animal persons”.

53
This attraction to the past is a most recurrent pattern. The fathers leave their wives and children
in a repeated way, such as Achille who is the first one to leave, to find a better life. Then
Kuntaw, Achille’s son, leaves in the hope to find his father, leaving in his turn, his son Tonny.
Tonny is alone with his mother who has no resources and is taken by a white man at the English
trading post as a concubine. Tonny has to live in the streets around the post. He finally finds
Kuntaw and takes his children to leave them with their grandfather, in the hope that they will
have a better life with their grandfather. Towards the first half of the 19th century, Jinot,
abandoned to his grandfather Kuntaw by his father Tonny, leaves his only son Aaron when he
goes to New-Zealand, and dies there without seeing Aaron again. He also fails to climb up the
social ladder, because after the murder of his manager, he cannot go back to his work in an axe
manufactory and has to resume wood cutting for a living.

Native characters hold on to the past – the sons to their fathers – because it seems the only good
thing, even if they have not witnessed it. Amboise expresses the same idea: “Everything
yesterday! Everything good happens long ago!” (Proulx, 2017, p.283). By contrast, the Dukes
form a family which goes forward, always wanting to accelerate progress. However, by always
wanting to go forward, they neglect the forest – while the repetitive looking back to the past of
the Sels enables them to imagine a place where the forest is respected and thus, nostalgia of the
past is not entirely negative, while the Dukes are entirely destructive. Old Sosep’s speech, as
well as Kuntaw’s speech, as will be seen later, try to rethink, reorganize their community while
there is no such movement in the Duke. The collective meetings of the Mi’kmaq community,
which help rethinking the lives of their community, are opposed to the board meetings of the
Duke family, the business talks, and deforestation. At the end of the novel, and without much
improvement to their condition, Sels are still imagining a better life: “Once again Sels took up
axes, and although everything was difficult they continued to talk together, to look for ways out
of their troubles” (Proulx, 2017, p.610).

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 3. Evolution of Forests’ Perception
In her paper “Terror, Error or Refuge: Forests in Western Literature”, Catherine Addison
identifies tree major ways in which literary works have imagined forests: the forest as the
opposite of the city – which stands for civilisation; forests as a place of “wandering”; or forests
as a refuge (Addison, 2007, p.119). In Barkskins, forest as a place of darkness and savagery is
predominant for the major part of the novel. Barkskins, by focusing on early capitalism, and its
Nature/Humanity distinction, reflects on how capitalism sees the forest as out of civilisation, as
a place of economic interests; but also portrays the imaginary of the forest before the Romantic
artistic movement of the end of the 18th century, where the forests “were the cluttered and
darkened spaces that had to be cleared in order to let in enlightenment and build the courtly
city” (Addison, 2007, p.116). Barkskins is thus at the opposite of the rhetoric of wonder in the
two other books of this thesis: forest as a magical place in Wollheben’s The Hidden Life of
Trees and trees triggering mystical visions in The Overstory. However, we have two
conceptions of the forest from the beginning: the European/American one, as well as the Native
one.

The beginning of Barkskins clearly states the project of the colonists: clearing the land or what
they call a “grand déffrichement” (Proulx, 2017, p.9). Some characters are opposed to that
project, they do not want to cut more trees than necessary, but the majority take it for granted
that the forests are wild things made to be exterminated. Seigneur Trépagny for example says:
“we are here to clear the forest, to subdue this evil wilderness” (Proulx, 2017, p.17), and most
characters repeat this idea. René is the one to wonder: “Why do we cut the forest while there
are so many fine clearings?”(Proulx, 2017, p.17), and the two Trépagny brothers also
disapprove, but their voice is not heard. René is answered: “Of course it is best to choose a
wooded site and clear it – the more the trees we cut down the sooner we’ll have fine farms and
more settlers.” (Proulx, 2017, p.33). René feels some injustice: “In France, thought René, the
forests were controlled by laws beyond the desires of the seigneur. That Trépagny had the right
to order the clearing confounded him and he sensed injustice” (Proulx, 2017, p.29). That
injustice, however, will slowly decrease, and every Sel character will get used to cutting down
trees for a living. What is more, cutting trees seems one of the only possible jobs available to
Natives. The descendants of René, partly Mi’kmaq, will find it easier to identify themselves as
tree choppers, than to identify as Native Americans (which was alluded to in the description of
René’s death). Since they lack an identity, it is easily replaced by their “function” in the new
society. Achille wishes that he was chopping trees with his father again (Proulx, 2017, p.198);

55
for Jinot, “taking down trees was his anodyne” (Proulx, 2017, p.308); Josime identifies himself
as “tree chopper” (Proulx, 2017, p.314). It is only by the admission of other immigrants from
Europe in the country that the feeling of injustice revives in Barkskins. The two Breitsprecher
cousins are in fact appalled that Americans have no sense of forest management. Armenius
(surveyor for the Dukes) tries to explain to his cousin Dieter (who came from Germany to see
the great American forests) how North Americans consider forests: “Hopeless, hopeless to try
to describe the situation in North America, where people spurned the craft of forestry” (Proulx,
2017, p.475). Armenius later explains that they see no logical connection between the pure air
in the forest and the poor quality of air in the city, Americans thinking that this is related to
God’s will (Proulx, 2017, p.480).

There is an opposition between, firstly, the fact that the characters think that the forests are
infinite, even towards the end of the novel: “So extensive are the forests here that Americans
cannot see an end to them. Therefore, they have no interest in preserving them.” (Proulx, 2017,
p.480). And secondly, there is a vague conscience that forests are receding, every time the
Dukes have to find another spot for their exploitation. Ecological considerations are present in
Barkskins: erosion, pollution in the cities, extinction of species, but these seem to be there as
details that the characters do not always notice. The Sels realise the loss of the beavers, for
example, because it is directly linked to their culture. The Dukes, however, make money on the
destruction of nature. And so, one another reason why climate change is a difficult topic to
address in a novel, is that “climate effects are all around us all the time” (Callaway, 2018, p.1).
In Barkskins, events like the Dust Bowl episode occur, but no character is able to link it with
deforestation. As in The Bone Clock (2014), which Callaway analyses, the environmental crisis
becomes a major theme at the end of the novel. In these two novels, problems created by climate
change have turned alarming. These novels, as Callaway explains, warn the reader all along the
novel to pay attention to small changes, to details, to what has become the ordinary, or else
climate issues will become unmanageable.

The only real considerations about forests start with Dieter and Armenius Breitsprecher’s
conversations about deforestation and its consequences: “Surely they have some sense of soil
erosion, so painfully obvious when it appears?” (Proulx, 2017, p.480), inquires Dieter. They
discuss forest management and its economic advantages. Still, at the same period of time, other
characters do not understand forest management: “God’s sake, how on earth does he manage a
forest ?” says at the Duke board meeting Edward. Cut ‘em down! That’s forest managing”

56
(Proulx, 2017, p.476). Then comes Charles, son of Lavinia and Dieter, who has a more radical
view on forests: he refuses any exploitation of trees, and moves to South America to study
tropical forests, their biodiversity. He refuses the idea of replanting and is in favour of
preserving old growth forests: “I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forests
[…] A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind.” (Proulx, 2017, p.643).

To finish with, Sapatasia’s group (composed of tree Sels family members and other secondary
characters, working to reforestation at the end of the 20th century) finds an in-between: since
the old-growth forests are disappearing, they have to reforest the country, even if the forests
they will plant will not resemble the original ones. This echoes the Natives’ situation, who have
to move on and live in the world that has changed; as explained by Ursula Heise, stories of
extinction often consider that, when a species becomes extinct, people also consider that this is
the end of their culture or nation. However, Heise suggests a more positive thinking, where new
species could also bring a new identity to a nation or a group. In Barkskins this is materialized
with Sapatasia’s group replanting trees and hoping to build a future for other generations.

4. Natives, the Forest and Hybridity

The link between trees and Natives is clearly established in the novel: “The Forest was a grand
resource and it was both the enemy and wealth. Achille felt it was the same with the Mi'kmaq:
the white settlers used them and took them down.” (Proulx, 2017, p.196). In fact, as life
becomes more and more cruel for the Sel members, the forests of America recede equally.
However, the relationship between nature and the Natives does not start with colonialism and
their joined decimation. They are in fact linked by the animistic belief that all things of nature
are connected, and that every element of that network has equal importance and deserves equal
respect. But it is true to say that nature and the Natives also have a shared fate as soon as
colonialism starts in North America. Similar to how ecofeminism considers that nature and
women have a special bond, because both had and have to face similar patterns of domination
(nature is dominated by human beings, and women by men), the same can be said for Natives
and nature. Both are colonised, suppressed, denied their identity and complexity.

However, the last part of the novel, part ten, almost takes a U-turn, breaks the logical
continuation of the relentless march of history/capitalism. Natives become actors of their lives;

57
they are not repeatedly characterized by the same traits as their ancestors. And whereas the
forests are cut down from the beginning of the book, some characters start to replant it. Part one
to part nine are mostly about destructive motives, while part ten, although still grim, is about
reconstruction. A more hopeful for the Sels future was already predictable by this speech given
by old Kuntaw to Aaron:

"I know how it is", he said. "I felt this. Look you." He took an empty wooden bowl, put in a
dipper of water, asked Mauri to bring a dipper of mackerel oil from the pot and added it. He
stirred the water and oil briskly with a forked twig until it whirled into an amalgam of froth.
"Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi'kmaw. In the bowl is mix-up, métis," he said, "whiteman and
Mi'kmak. Now watch." They all stared at the bowl. The glistening mackerel oil rose and floated
on top of the water. "That's how it was with me, long ago. I tried to be whiteman, but Mi'kmaw
oil in me come to top. That same oil come up in you. Sometime I hope for this Canada that the
Mi'kmaw oil will blend with the water and oil come to the top. We will hold our country again
someday"” he said , "but we will be a little bit changed - a little bit watery and the whiteman a
bit oily." (Proulx, 2017, p.601)

Old Kuntaw once more in Barkskins expresses what all male Indians of the family wishes: to
come back to their true origins, their original land, which means to not live like a white man,
but like a Mi’kmaq. Kuntaw explains that two forces fight in him: the white men’s ways and
the Mi'kmaq’s ways, but that the latter are stronger in him. This speech also echoes Sosep’s
speech discussed earlier, although Kuntaw’s answer to Aaron seems more reasonable: instead
of imagining that they still live in the original Mi’kmaq world, Indians must accept being
transformed a little. The oil and the water are also metaphors for the two families, the Sel and
the Duke. The two families will mix together, as they do at some point, when Kuntaw has a
relationship with Beatrix, Outger’s daughter; three children are born from that union. Kuntaw
perhaps illustrates in his speech how he became westernized by Beatrix, and how Beatrix tried
to find her Indian origins in Kuntaw. Coincidence or not, the main Sel characters of the end of
the novel, the activists who try to reverse deforestation – Sapatasia, Félix and Jeanne – all stem
from this union.

A change in the structure of Barkskins discloses the coming change in the course of the story.
All the other parts of the novel either feature the Sel family members or the Duke family
members, alternately. The tenth part, however, features both families; it has eight chapters, the
first five chapters devoted to the Duke family, and the three last ones to the Sel. The transition
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is not announced, the fifth chapter of part ten finishes with the sale of the Breitsprecher-Duke
company, and the last line mentioning that Breitsprecher Seedlings still works as a separate
entity (Proulx, 2017, p.678). This separate project originating in the Duke family is continued
by Sapatasia’s project, who is joined by Jeanne and Félix. The two families being reunited in
the last part recalls Kuntaw’s metaphor of oil and water mixing together. Moreover, the Duke’s
story ends on a failure, the end of their family business. There also seems to be a dead end in
the Duke descendancy, while an opposite trend can be observed in the Sel family. Félix says
anecdotally: “if every Sel relative would give us a dollar, we’d be rich.” This shows how
numerous the Sels are. In a way, the Sels have absorbed the Duke family: Sapatasia, Jeanne and
Felix all come from the union of Kuntaw and Beatrix, the latter having Duke blood in her veins.
The Sels, who have been dominated for the whole duration of the novel have now the upper
hand. They do not resemble their ancestors, they have been westernized, but they have survived,
and they are trying to protect the nature. Since the destinies of the forest and the Natives are
related in the book, it could be said that, if the Sels start to have a more positive tendency, the
same could be said of the forest. Not in their original form, obviously – like the traditional way
of living of the Native Americans cannot come back, the old growth forests will not come back
in their original form but might come back in another.

5. Conclusion
In this chapter, there was no literary mechanism as such which enable the reader to feel closer
to trees after reading the analysed novel. Barkskins has no didactical aim, i.e. the desire of
teaching something about trees’ particular ways of being in the world like in The Hidden Life
of Trees or indirectly in The Overstory. It does however try to instruct the reader on the
Capitalocene with a historical perspective and this is why there is no particular focus on the
trees themselves but on deforestation as a consequence of capitalism. The novel draws a parallel
between forests and Native Americans and highlights how their fate is linked, and to a certain
extent there is also a disdain for all the characters and the novel elevates itself above the human
world. Opposite to how Richard Powers and Peter Wohlleben try to reenchant our
understanding of nature, Annie Proulx tries to apply in her novel the mechanisms of capitalism.
From a historical perspective, Proulx recounts the beginnings of capitalism and shows how our
society came this far. However, the reader never loses a certain sympathy for the Sel family
and Proulx shows some hope towards the end of the novel, even if the general tendency is still
grim. From the high-shot angle perspective, Proulx gets rid of the characters altogether to make
a more posthuman novel, although not putting other species forward either.

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 Chapter Four: Scale and Posthumanism, a Comparative Study of the
Corpus
Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes,
everything passes, only the world remains, only
time endures.
— Denis Diderot

The previous chapters have each dealt with a specific work of the chosen corpus. Each chapter
provided an opportunity to analyse certain aspects of the ecofiction genre and the current
debates within the field of ecocriticism, with a focus on trees and how they are figured in
ecofictions, but also how these beings can come closer to humans in the collective imaginary.

In chapter 1, the study of The Hidden Life of Trees allowed us to analyse the limits of humans’
understanding of trees and how it is possible to address the life of trees without altering their
essence, and at the same time attract a wide audience to change people’s perception of nature.
Anthropomorphism has been defined as a natural mechanism used to understand one’s world,
criticised by the scientific community because it highlights resemblances with humanity but
erases the plant’s specificity. However, used in The Hidden Life of Trees as a vulgarisation
method allowed many readers to have a better understanding of trees. Such a book can be more
impactful on the short term than scientific research which might take a decade to reach the
public.

In chapter 2, The Overstory has been characterised as a maximalist novel, balanced by its
internal dialectic (chaos-function and cosmos-function). It has been demonstrated that there is
a balance between how trees and humans are represented, i.e. the anthropocentric aspect of the
novel is nuanced because it shows how humans are interconnected with trees. The Overstory
also reflects on the climate crisis and the ways to address it, which is mirrored in the opposition
between the omniscient narrator and the human characters. The metafictional aspects of the
book have also been addressed through the character of Patricia Westerford, writer and
scientists who attempts in her books to make trees interesting for her readers, without
vulgarising too much; and on the other hand, when confronted to the scientific community, she
tries not to let her animistic feelings show.

In chapter 3, Barkskins has been described as a naturalist novel taking a three-hundred-year

frame in order to map the beginnings and the functioning of the Capitalocene. The novel shows

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through the use of two families how capitalism created the society-nature divide which
classified animals, plants and other humans (Natives, women, Black people, etc.), as part of
nature, and as a consequence enabled white people to exploit them or use them as cheap labour.
The lack of characterisation of the Native characters as well as the indistinctiveness of trees of
the forest in the novel reflects this disinterest of capitalism in these beings. However, the
timespan of the novel erases all characters’ specificities all together.

The similarities between these books have been addressed briefly in each chapter, but this
comparative chapter aims to address the similarities and differences of the works of the corpus
together. First, this chapter attempts to identify general trends in these three books about the
literary mechanisms used by the authors of this corpus. Then, the chapter focuses on two
important themes or concepts in ecocriticism – scale and posthumanism – and compares how
the chosen corpus deals with these two themes. One of the key similarities or differences in
these three books is scale: in fact, The Overstory and Barkskins are two long novels, which take
a broad perspective on the world, the first one with its nine very different characters, and all the
topics it addresses, the other with its three-hundred-year perspective and numerous characters
as well. On the other hand, The Hidden Life of Trees is very personal and is based on
observations of a local area. These matters of scale echo debates around planetary views in
ecocriticism, as will be developed later. Questions of scales are also related to posthumanist
views, since choosing a broader perspective means taking a step back from full-blown
anthropocentrism. Posthumanism is also a crucial aspect overall in the selected corpus. It can
be seen that the human perspective is challenged in every book of the corpus, but in very
different ways; the interspecies aspect of the plot (inclusion of trees in the plot, if not as
characters, as a major presence) has to do with a rejection of anthropocentrism in these
ecofictions. However, anthropocentrism is challenging to leave altogether behind, because
there is a certain impossibility to comprehend trees’ experience as a whole, as seen in chapter
one. The use of the concept of posthumanism as a point of comparison enables us to draw
conclusions on how the three books make space for trees in this human world.

1. General Trends on Literary Mechanisms Used in the Corpus

First, two general rhetorics or two different approaches can be identified. On the one hand,
Powers and Wohlleben write about nature with the aim of re-enchanting it for the reader. In
Wohlleben’s non-fiction it is science and observation that serve this rhetoric, in Powers’ novel
it is mystical revelations that reveal the beauty of nature. On the other hand, in Annie Proulx’s

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Barkskins, the aim is not to re-enchant nature, but to show the causes of deforestation and how
capitalism destroys nature and decimates ethnic minorities. In other words, there is on the one
hand an agenda that actively aims to change our perception of nature, and on the other hand
one that aims to educate us on one aspect of the climate crisis but does not put nature as a
character forward.

Second, a number of literary techniques to bring trees and humans closer in the books have
been identified. In the first chapter, there was mostly a use of anthropomorphic language, as
well as the semantic field of cooperation and natural selection. The Overstory also uses
anthropomorphic language, but also "vegetalises" humans by comparing them to plants and
trees. Moreover, The Overstory shows how everything is related to trees and links the lives of
the tree and human characters together so much that their stories are no longer separable. In
Barkskins likewise, there is a convergence between man and human, but it is a convergence
through suffering and destruction, a convergence of destiny.

The three books also deal differently with matters of planetary time and space, and are
posthumanists to different degrees, as will be seen in the following sections.

2. Scale, planetary space and time

Scale, whether it is related to time or space, is a much-debated topic in ecocriticism. As far as

space is concerned, scholars of the field often discuss the possibility of including in literature
the scale at which the consequences of the climate crisis take place. Phenomena such as rising
temperatures, even if they are caused mainly by developed countries, affect the planet as a
whole. First-wave ecocriticism focused on the regional and the local, and conceived local
communities as “natural, supposedly conserved from the contaminations of international
capitalism” (Clark, 2019, p.39). However, Clark writes, thinking of local communities as
“natural” is equal to ignoring the fact that “local ecosystems change and affect each other over
centuries, while human beings have been shifting plants and animals across continents since
prehistory” (Clark, 2019, p.39). The emphasis in ecocriticism has now shifted to the global, or
at least to the study of how global and local are interrelated. This change of focus appears with
publications such as Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place & Sense of Planet (2008), where she
criticises the emphasis of environmental studies on the local, with research topics such as
“Wordsworth and the lake district … Thoreau and the woods of Massachusetts” (Clark, 2019,

62
p.39). However, such large-scale phenomena like rising temperatures, thawing permafrost,
rising sea levels are difficult to render, in novels for example, because novels generally focus
on the human, and are limited in terms of pages, making it difficult to take a planetary point of
view.

Regarding the notion of time in ecocriticism, scholars also study how a planetary vision of time,
exceeding human history and acknowledging geological times, could be included in literary
productions. In ecocriticism, the concept of “deep time” is linked to geological times and refers
to "the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it" (Farrier,
2016). One example of a study of literature with a broader consideration of time is Wai Chee
Dimock’s “Deep Time: American Literature and World History” (2001), where she discusses
the need to go beyond national literature – here, American literature – to look into world history,
since the history of a nation is very limited when one studies phenomena which exceed the
history of a nation (Dimock, 2001). This notion of deep time is part of the broader posthumanist
school of thought since it seeks to consider more than just the human. Another concept useful
for the study of time is the Anthropocene – not posthumanist, because centred on humans and
their deeds. The Anthropocene refers to a new geologic era (following the Holocene) in which
humans have become equal to geologic forces, since they are able to change how the earth is
shaped and how it functions. For example, humanity has increased the average temperature of
the Earth’s climate system, through its energy-demanding actions. On the one hand, if we were
to compare deep time with the Anthropocene on a 24h-clock, humanity would have appeared
at the last minute, thus putting into perspective the era of the Anthropocene, and the tendency
to think humans as the centre of the world. However, on the other hand, the anthropogenic
climate crisis shapes the earth in the same way the earth has been shaped through geological
times, making humans’ force similar to that of geological changes which happened in deep time
(Farrier, 2016). In the following paragraphs, I will detail how the three books of the chosen
corpus deal with planetary or large-scale views to bring a less anthropocentric vision of the
novel.

In chapter 1, The Hidden Life of Trees does not, at first sight, seem to deal with scale. The story
is recounted in the present and although it states general truths about trees, and tries to reach a
maximum of readers, the observations in the book are local, that is, in the forest of the district
of Hummel. However, as Wohlleben tells the reader in his book, his personal observations in a
forest in Germany are not dissimilar to other ones all across the world. Wohlleben studies
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species that are not especially exotic, but some global concern shows, through the author citing
some consequences of climate change on trees’ environment and thus on their functioning. He
cites for example the case of the “drunken trees” in Siberia (where the permafrost melted,
causing the trees to tilt), or the deforestation in countries where forests are crucial to cool down
temperatures in the land. Wohlleben’s aim with this non-fiction book is also to reach a planetary
audience to deliver his message. However, the sense of time identified in The Overstory, in
regards with time as experienced by trees, is absent here: Wohlleben’s trees as said in chapter
one, become “human” through the anthropomorphic language, and we sometimes loose this
sense of otherness of these beings, which comes amongst other things with that particular sense
of long time. This novel is thus more about the local, the careful observation of a particular
place, and the personal experience of the woods than about the global, even if it addresses these
matters from time to time.

In chapter 2, The Overstory has been defined as a maximalist novel. Several characteristics of
this maximalist novel – such as the encyclopaedic aspect of the book, its length, and the way it
tries to encompass a world within itself – tend towards a broader vision of the world, an
inclusion in the book of more elements than a novel generally contains. However, the novel is
not really part of the planetary turn, since the plot is set in America, and references to other part
of the world (like Vietnam) are cited in relation to American history (the Vietnam War). The
novel brings together personalities of very different background, making the case for diversity,
but still, there novel remains local since the plot never leaves America. The novel sometimes
refers to older times, but it does so in the aim to include trees’ sense of time in the novel: for
example, the Hoel chestnut tree sees generations of Hoel family members; when Douglas falls
from an airplane and that he lands on a banyan tree, the narrater recounts how the tree’s life
started: “Miles below and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole
at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden
inside” (Powers, 2019, p.101). Then the narration explains how “Decades passed. Centuries.
War on the back of elephants gave way to televised moon landings and hydrogen bombs”
(Powers, 2019, p.101). Trees in this novel extend the timeline of the human story, not to
geological times, but at least to tree time, which helps taking some distance from human life,
as will be covered in the posthumanist section of this chapter.

In chapter 3, we have seen that Barkskins has been portrayed as an impressive account of 300
years of history, with a plot that also moves around the globe: in Europe, China, New-Zealand
64
and South America. It thus combines scales of time and space. Barkskins’s choice of a three-
hundred-year frame could possibly refer to the lifespan of a given tree, but it also conveniently
encompasses the birth of capitalism. Barkskins takes more or less the birth of Capitalism and
the Anthropocene as the starting point of the plot, and follows the unfolding of it throughout
the novel. However, Barkskins is quite critical of this period since the characters, as said in
chapter 3, are easily discarded, and the narration passes on quickly to other characters. The use
of space as well shows how Capitalism and its ways colonise the world progressively. The use
of time and space are not like in The Overstory a way to encompass the world in thorough and
balanced way, but space and time here focus on a crucial turning point in history and its
consequences for the planet. Here again, Barkskins is not entirely a planetary novel, since the
time reference it takes is Capitalism, that is, human history, but is the most posthuman work of
the chosen corpus.

On the one side of the continuum, The Hidden Life of Trees represents a very “local” non-
fiction, which emphasises careful observation of local species with a certain affection towards
nature. On the other hand, Barkskins takes the opposite perspective by zooming out on the
human world and showing capitalism’ evolution and expansion on the world map. In The
Overstory, notions of time arise when dealing with trees: trees in The Overstory bring the
narration away from the sole present.

3. Posthumanism, Characters and Death

As mentioned above, questions of scale automatically involve posthumanist considerations.

Posthumanism is a “newly gained awareness of the limits of previous anthropocentric and
humanistic assumptions”, which considers all living beings as equal, without any hierarchy
(Ferrando, 2020, p.29). Larger frames of time and space move the focus off-centre, away from
the human character’s story, to encompass other living beings within that frame. This is
especially relevant for the authors in our corpus, since they try to grab the reader’s attention
and to direct it on trees. This leads us to analyse how human characters are depicted in
comparison to trees in these books, and as a consequence how posthumanist these are. The two
novels of the corpus have human characters in their plots, but that does not mean that a novel
without human characters would be less anthropocentric. In fact, attempts to make trees the

65
only characters are not especially prone to be less anthropocentric: writing in the place of
animals or trees falls within the role of imagination, and writers are not immune from imposing
their human experience of the world onto that of animals and trees, as has been seen in the first
chapter. The question is then: how do these books balance anthropocentrism? How do they give
enough space to trees without projecting human thoughts/feelings on them? How are the
characters shown, be they trees or humans? What mutual influence is there between trees and
humans? In the next two sections, I analyse how posthumanism shows through the use of
characters, and then through the motive of death.

a. Characters
In The Hidden Life of Trees, the only “characters” are trees, which, through the
anthropomorphic language are more or less turned into humans. Nonetheless, there is no real
individuality in these trees, and they are made alive through the anthropomorphic language of
the narration. Here the book focuses only on trees and other plants, but the book is probably
the most anthropocentric and least posthumanist of the corpus, since trees are
anthropomorphized.

In The Overstory, each character is associated with a particular tree, which hints towards the
interpretation of equality and interconnection between humans and trees. The narration clearly
takes a posthumanist point of view when it states: "This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a
world of trees where humans have just arrived" (Powers, 2018, p.530). Some trees resemble
characters to a certain extent – they do not talk or interact, but they stand separately enough
from the descriptions of nature to be considered as characters. These trees are the Hoel Chestnut
tree, as well as the giant redwood tree called Mimas in which Oliva and Nicholas live in order
to defend the territory. With The Overstory, Powers still chooses to use human characters whose
lives form the plot of the book, but at the same time balances this humanity by associating it
with trees.

Barkskins is the opposite: the numerous human characters, and the trees, have no individuality.
All the characters are discarded all together, highlighting the broader perspective rather than
the individuals.

The fact that The Overstory does not get rid of the characters altogether like Barkskins makes
it more reader friendly. It teaches the reader that trees are valuable, complex living beings which
are connected to our lives; it is not particularly posthumanist in the sense that there are still

66
strong human characters in the book, but rather because decentres the humans in the book by
entangling their lives with trees. It reaches a broad audience but at the same time, it is not as
anthropocentric as The Hidden Life of Trees.

b. Death
The relative importance of the human characters vs the tree in the corpus has just been
measured. In the three books which have been analysed, death plays an important role, to
rebalance the inequality between the human characters and the trees.

Regarding The Hidden Life of Trees, it has been demonstrated in the previous chapters how
trees are anthropomorphised by the language used in the non-fiction book. In this sense, trees
resemble human characters – they suffer and die like humans. This ethics of trees, based on a
relative resemblance in their suffering, echoes Anat Pick’s idea of « creaturely », which grounds
an ethics between animals and humans based on the similarities of their bodies, and how equally
vulnerable they are. We often oppose the intelligence of humans to the « pure necessity,
material bodies » of animals, but humans have bodies and suffer too (Pick, 2011, p.4). Creatures
are « living bodie[s], material, temporal, and vulnerable ». (Pick, 2011, p.5). Trees are not
sentient beings like animals and humans, they do not feel themselves suffering, or at least they
suffer in a different way. Wohlleben also demonstrates that trees, even if they can live for a
long time – he cites the oldest tree on earth, Old Tjikko, 9500 years old – are also vulnerable to
attacks coming from their environment. Wohlleben bridges the gap between trees’ experience
of the world and that of humans, through anthropomorphic language, which conveys the idea
of a similar way of suffering. Even if trees have usually a longer lifespan than humans, they are
vulnerable like humans, and the fact that they can die at any moment brings trees and humans
together.

The Overstory features very sudden deaths of mostly secondary characters; Patricia
Westerford’s father dies in a car accident, Nicholas Hoel’s parents and grandmother all die from
the cold of the winter while Nicholas had only left them for a few hours. Death is also present
in the lives of the main characters: Olivia is electrocuted and dies, but is reborn is a quasi-
religious way soon after. In Barskins, all the characters and especially the main characters die
of sudden but also violent deaths; which is related to the naturalist and determinist tone of the
novel. René Sel is murdered with an axe, James Duke freezes on a boat.

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In the two novels, death and vulnerability are generally used to put into perspective the relative
importance of humans on earth, to lessen the anthropocentrism of the novel. These sudden
deaths indicate how humans’ lives are relatively short as compared to that of trees, which can
live for several hundreds of years. These two novels are still traditional in the sense that they
involve human characters, trees are not the main characters of the novel. In The Overstory, the
death of humans shows contrast with the longevity of trees and the earth, while in Barkskins,
death relativises all of humans’ lives – not only the Sels’ – in the face of history and capitalism.

As a conclusion of this section on posthumanism, it can be said that a certain posthumanist idea
infuses every work of the corpus: in The Overstory, trees and humans appear more or less as
equal and interrelated, their lives cannot be disconnected, humans die abruptly, and a longer
sense of time related to trees is included in the novel. In Barkskins, trees and humans are also
connected in the sense that they are treated with the same disdain, they are equal in their
insignificance; almost all the characters die abruptly and the bigger picture matters more than
the individual human. In The Hidden Life of Trees, it could be argued that trees become equal
to us through the anthropomorphic language, even though this use of language diminishes tree’s
essence; Wohlleben also emphasises their vulnerability in order to make comparisons with
humans. The question is more how on the overall the novel infuses that posthumanism and how
this can serve to a potential reevaluation of what trees are for us in our lives. On the whole, the
reader “bonds” less with the trees in Barkskins, and to a certain extent in The Overstory as well,
because they are seen through the narrator or the characters’ eyes, they are not given a proper
voice. However, both novels keep this sense of otherness, of mystery about trees, while The
Hidden Life of Trees focuses on the similarities between trees and people through the
anthropomorphic language.

68
Conclusion
This master thesis began with the observation that the study of plants and most importantly that
of the human-plant relationship in the ecocritical field was still little studied. The symbolism of
the forest, as well as the place of forests in humans’ imaginary has been thoroughly discussed,
but the study of the link between trees and humans remains a minor subject of study. It is
necessary to study this relationship and the books that promote it because our society still
considers trees as living beings which can be used at our convenience. This is why this master
thesis sought to analyse how authors who address the issue of deforestation and the climate
crisis in general promote the human-tree relationship, or at least how they highlight trees so
that readers can finally understand trees as complex living beings. In the first chapter, an
ontological and metaphysical gap between humans and plants was identified, which raised
questions about how to bring such different entities into closer contact. Therefore, the aim was
to study the literary techniques with which the authors of books about trees try to address this
relationship and to bridge this gap. The first chapter focused on the anthropocentric language
and the debate around it in The Hidden Life of Trees. The second chapter examined The
Overstory and how a maximalist novel tries to find a balance between tree’s representation and
that of humans, and how it includes metafictional reflection on the climate crisis. The third
chapter analysed Barkskins and the very different perspective it offers, since it does not seek to
represent the trees but rather to show the joint destiny of the natives and the forest by imitating
capitalist methods through its treatment of the characters.

To recapitulate, the three books of the corpus can be reduced to two different rhetorics. The
first is that of wonder at nature (The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees). The second is a
naturalistic point of view of deforestation and does not leave much hope (Barkskins). There are
also two main aims: on the one hand The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees seek to
reenchant nature and bring humans closer to it, make the reader feel connected to nature again,
and on the other hand, Barkskins explains the historical, cultural and economic causes behind
deforestation; the link between humans and trees is only a link of oppression. As for the
mechanisms used, there was, for the first book, mainly a use of anthropomorphic language.
Peter Wohlleben also used a vocabulary related to natural selection and mutual aid to make his
trees more lively in our eyes, and emphasised trees’ vulnerability to relate it to our own
vulnerability. The second book also used anthropomorphic language and its opposite, the
“vegetalising” of the human characters, as well as a plot which entangles the lives of each

69
character with trees so much that the story of the characters would be completely different
without them. Powers also includes a longer sense of time (related to trees) in the novel, which
contrasts with the abrupt deaths of the human characters. In the third book, as said above, the
link was an historical link between the Natives and the forests: first a link of depence (Native
relying on food from the forest for their survival) and then a link of oppression after the
colonisation of North America, the Natives being decimated similarly to how trees were cut
down. Furthermore, it can be said that the novels had also more scope to play to discuss climate
change, deforestation and humanity’s behaviour towards nature. This could be seen through the
analysis of The Overstory which managed to discuss varied topics related to deforestation,
green activism, how art and writing can address etc. just with the intertext, but also used the
structure of the book, and the narrative to interconnect trees and humans. Barkskins as well
used two families in order to represent two different backgrounds and two different views of
the world; three hundred years of history were squeezed in the novel, as well as the evolutions
of mentalities towards the novel.

Apart from how the books of the chosen corpus handle the representation of trees, they also
have different ways to address the climate crisis. Peter Wohlleben sporadically addresses the
climate crisis in his non-fiction book; he sometimes comments on how trees’ behaviour change
with the effects of climate change. He is optimistic that people can build a kinder relationship
with nature, but he tones down this optimism at the end of the book, and explains that there is
a long way to go for humans to recognise that trees have some agency. The Overstory tried to
represent different kinds of discourses in the face of the climate crisis: the informative, scientific
discourse (represented by the omniscient narrator), the (extreme) activism of five of the
characters, and midway between these positions, an ecostoicist vision of the climate crisis.
Finally, Barkskins offers little hope, since it shows that the characters cannot easily escape their
destiny. Towards the end of the book, however, there is a message of resilience as the characters
from a marriage between the Duke and the Sel families organise their efforts to reforest the
country. But then again, the project is arduous and dangerous for the activists.

The last chapter assessed the extent to which the works in the corpus responded to a need, in
ecocriticism, to address the scale at which climate change is occurring. The three books
responded to this need in a mixed way: The Hidden Life of Trees is very local and The Overstory
encompasses many things, but the scenario is based solely in America. Only Barkskins is able
to show the global nature of the crisis through the expansion of capitalism to every corner of

70
the earth. Another aspect discussed was the temporality of the book, and we noticed that both
novels of the corpus refer to a longer period of time: in The Overstory, the presence of trees
brings history back to the past, while in Barkskins, the historical perspective is closer to the
longevity of a tree. The posthumanist nature of the three works in the corpus has also been
analysed. Posthumanism is inherent of these books because they try to foreground, or put on
the same level, other species than the human species. The Hidden Life of Trees and The
Overstory were relatively posthumanist in the sense that they emphasize the life of trees even
though humanity still has an important role in these two books. Barkskins is the most
posthumanist of these three books since the human characters are relatively insignificant.

The posthumanist nature of an ecofiction is one thing, but the important issue here is to change
people's conception of nature. For this, even if The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees do
not really meet the ecocritical criteria of planetary scale and time as well as posthumanism, they
re-enchant our vision of nature and seek to break the stereotype of the passive and uninteresting
plant. Even if Barkskins is highly detached from humanity, it does not help to build a caring
imaginary of the forest. It does, however, offer a good summary of the history of deforestation
in America, of capitalism, and of the oppressions that Native Americans have suffered and are
still suffering. The Overstory and The Hidden Life of Trees seem more effective in the aim of
changing our imaginary of nature since they have been more successful – in terms of number
of readers, and translations in the world – than Barkskins. A totally posthumanist novel is
probably impossible and even Barkskins does not get rid of the human characters entirely.

Michael Marder said that plants embody limits to empathy and that we risk erasing the
specificity of trees if we use empathy towards plants, because we are not capable of
understanding their vision of life since it is ontologically and metaphysically different. We have
seen that this is true, at least in the Hidden Life of Trees, that a heavy use of anthropomorphic
language risks to erase the plants’ unique intelligence. On the other hand, it has also been
observed that books like Peter Wohlleben’s have a huge audience and can thus participate in
the shift in our imaginary needed to slow down the climate crisis. Perhaps a good midway
between a too anthropomorphic book and a too posthumanist novel is The Overstory, since it
tries to show how humans are influenced by trees without being too anthropocentric.

This study, as explained in the introduction, was limited because of the number of literary work
studied. It was not possible to generalise the observation made about trees in ecofictions or the
71
human-tree relationship and the literary mechanisms used to reenchant our vision of nature.
However, this leaves to other study the possibility to examine systematically fiction and/or non-
fiction on trees and see if the techniques used to portray and foster a human-tree relationship
are repeated through these books.

72
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