Abstract
This chapter explores how the human-botanical entanglements of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory (2018) encourage us to rethink agency as dispersed, connected, and multiple. Prompted by Eugene Thacker’s question “how is anything accomplished” in a “distributed organization?” (Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part Two). CTheory. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14541/5388, 2004, n.p.), I explore the strategies Powers uses to represent the emergence and organisation of human and nonhuman collectives. Through polyvocal narration, a breakdown in chapter demarcation, and the patterned repetition of phrases, ideas, and textual references, The Overstory subtly weaves together the lives of its human characters. Using recent scientific work on plant communication, I analogically map these human connections onto the vegetal agency of trees, which use ‘silent’ and ‘invisible’ chemical signals and fungal, or mycelial, networks to communicate information. Reading for patterns within the novel, I argue that repetitions containing the plant affects of ‘collectivity’ and ‘metamorphosis’ operate as textual equivalents to the chemical signals of plants, weaving together human and vegetal worlds. By following The Overstory’s analogical threads, it is possible to argue that Powers’s novel evokes a non-singular and non-anthropocentric form of agency, a multispecies and ‘mycorrhizal’ multiplicity.
This work was supported by the European Research Council (Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [714166]).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For the remainder of this chapter, I will refer to Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) simply as O.
- 2.
There is a great deal of important research on nonhuman animals in narratives; for example, David Herman’s recent Narratology Beyond the Human (2018) and Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines (2011). However, for the most part, these studies focus on the individual animal. For more on collective animal narration, see also Dominic O’Key’s recent article “Animal Collectives” (2020).
- 3.
For more on ‘dance’ as affective movement, see Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Heinrich von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810) in A Thousand Plateaus (2013, 313). For scholars like B.C. Crandall, the metaphor of ‘dance’ evokes the creative potential of encounters; for example, in Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance (1996), he writes how “all life consists of an intricate molecular dance”—the movements of which “give rise to ant colonies, peacocks, computers and geodes” in a way that is both “bizarre and wonderful” (194, note 3).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
In his work on plant signalling and communication, Günther Witzany discusses “signs” as both “messenger substances” and “information carriers” (2006, 169). While terms like these are frequent in scientific discourse, it is important to note that the language of ‘message,’ ‘information,’ and ‘content,’ is potentially problematic in that it suggests a separation between medium and message that may not—especially in biology—hold. For an interrogation of the idea of ‘content,’ see Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content (2017). In their argument for an approach to basic minds without “content,” Hutto and Myin contend that “there are no grounds for thinking that the world, standing apart from agentive systems, contains anything that could be called informational content” (71).
- 7.
Indeed, in The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely blends the two in the concept of the “affect sign” (2015, 75–6).
- 8.
In her detailed reading of Powers’s novel, Birgit Spengler also considers this non-anthropocentric approach to language. See Spengler (2019), “Arboreal Encounters in Richard Powers’s The Overstory.”
- 9.
I say largely because orchids have been found to “hack” mycorrhizal systems taking sugars from fungi without returning organic carbon (Taylor and Bruns 1997).
- 10.
Ben de Bruyn also draws attention to the pattern of polyphony in Powers’s novels in “Polyphony Beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and Community in Coetzee and Powers” (2016, 364–383).
- 11.
See Caracciolo, “Flocking” (2020a) for a similar use of ethologists Selous and Couzin.
- 12.
In “Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS)” (2012), John Ryan explains that while the term ‘vegetable’ is today used to refer to someone who has “limited capacity for movement and intelligence” and who is “trapped in a mindless state […] without the ability to reason or feel,” as Douglas Harper observes, this pathological understanding only dates back to the end of the nineteenth century (quoted in Ryan 2012, 106). Before this, ‘vegetative’ was, as Russell Hitchings and Verity Jones note, associated with ‘the power of growth’ and, following the “root meaning of the word […] activity and enlivened animation” (quoted in Ryan 2012, 106).
- 13.
Indeed, articles published in 2011 and 2014 note that despite understanding “many essential compounds of the communication process” (both intra- and inter-species), mycorrhiza remains “relatively enigmatic from a research perspective” and the “the actual molecular mechanism of […] communication remains for most parts unknown” (Cottier and Mühlschlegel 2011; Behie and Bidochka 2014). Such is also the case for human biology. As Capra notes, “[w]hile biologists know the precise structure of a few genes, they know very little of the ways in which genes communicate and cooperate in the development of an organism. In other words, they know the alphabet of the genetic code but have almost no idea of its syntax” (1997, 78). In the twenty years since the publication of Capra’s book, scientists have progressed to the level of word comprehension and have a much more comprehensive understanding of semantics; however, the syntax is still largely unknown. See also Monica Gagliano et al.’s recent The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (2017).
- 14.
“Patterns reveal themselves as he watches, and they’re wild. Nobody’s in charge of the mass mobilization, that much seems clear. Yet they port the sticky food back to the nest in the most coordinated way” (O, 54); “Patterns rise up, and she grabs at them” (O, 56); “Armed with the patterns the book reveals, he imagines himself running experiments […] The mere idea that human behavior—his lifelong nemesis—possesses hidden but knowable patterns as beautiful as anything he once witnessed in insects makes his insides sing” (O, 61); “His words of thanks contain four of the top six releasers for producing action patterns in someone else: reciprocity, scarcity, validation, and appeal to commitment” (O, 63); “What are those treetops like? They’re like that cog-toothed drawing toy, spinning out surprise patterns from the simplest nested cycles” (O, 355); “The conversation is long, patient, beyond any party’s ability to follow, and the patterned noises her kind add to it are still brand-new” (O, 423); “The more she reads, the more facts evade her. The more the learners read, the more patterns they find” (O, 478); “Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns” (O, 482); “With each rotted trunk he nudges into the pattern, the plan swells” (O, 486); “The visitor looks at Nicholas’s creation. The shape under construction unfolds in all directions. He shakes his head. Then he picks up a nearby branch and fits it into the pattern” (O, 486); “Two centuries more, and these five living letters too, will fade back into the swirling patterns, the changing rain and air and light” (O, 502). All emphases of ‘pattern’ mine.
- 15.
While, as I have argued in this chapter, the analogy draws together humans and the botanical world, it is important to recognise imperfections in the mapping. For more on this, see Caracciolo’s “We-Narratives” (2020b), where he argues that “the humans are unable to act with the coordination of ‘networked soil,’ which reflects a broader shortcoming of humanity.”
- 16.
See, for example, some of the issues Kohn raises in relation collective groupings like “Actor Network Theory” (2013, 91).
References
Alders, Maximilian. 2015. “Introduction: Social Minds in Factual and Fictional Narration.” Narrative 25 (2): 113-122.
Behie, Scott W., and Michael J. Bidochka. 2014. “Nutrient Transfer in Plant-Fungal Symbioses.” Trends in Plant Science 19 (11): 734-740.
Bekhta, Natalya. 2017. “We-Narratives: The Distinctiveness of Collective Narration.” Narrative 25 (2): 164-81.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bladow, Kyle A., and Jennifer K. Ladino, eds. 2018. Affective Ecocriticsm: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Burgess, Miranda. 2011. “On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form.” Poetics Today 32 (2): 289-321.
Calarco, Matthew. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press.
Capra, Fritjof. 1997. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books.
Caracciolo, Marco. 2020a. “Flocking Together: Embodiment and Fictional Engagements with Collective Animal Minds” PMLA 135 (2): 239-253.
Caracciolo, Marco. 2020b. “We-Narratives and the Challenges of Nonhuman Collectives.” Style 54 (1): 86-97.
Contzen, Eva von, and Maximilian Alders. 2015. “Collective Experience in Narrative: Conclusions and Proposals.” Narrative 23 (2): 226-229.
Cottier, Fabien, and Fritz A. Mühlschlegel. 2011. “Communication in Fungi.” International Journal of Microbiology 2012: 1-9.
Couzin, Iain D. 2009. “Collective Cognition in Animal Groups.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13 (1): 36-43.
Crandall, B. C., ed. 1996. Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davis, Diane. 2011. “Creaturely Rhetorics.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 44 (1): 88-94.
De Bruyn, Ben. 2016. “Polyphony Beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and Community in Coetzee and Powers.” Studies in the Novel 48 (3): 364-383.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 2013. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Fludernik, Monika. 2017. “The Many in Action and Thought: Towards a Poetics of the Collective in Narrative.” Narrative 25 (2): 139-163.
“Form.” 1989. In Oxford English Dictionary Online, Second Edition. https://www.oed.com.
Galgiano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Viera. 2017. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gentner, Dedre, Keith James Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov, eds. 2001. The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gentsch, Antje, and Matthis Synofzik. 2014. “Affective Coding: The Emotional Dimension of Agency.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (article 608): 1–7.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 2010. “Affect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual/Lawrence Grossberg (An Interview with Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg).” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, 309-338. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Herman, David. 2018. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Houser, Heather. 2016. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hutto, Daniel D., and Erik Myin. 2017. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacout, Tiana, Robin Boardman, and Liam Geary Baulch. 2019. “Building an Action.” In This Is Not a Drill: The Extinction Rebellion Handbook, edited by Extinction Rebellion, 109-111. London: Penguin.
Knights, Sam. 2019. “Introduction: The Story so Far.” In This Is Not a Drill: The Extinction Rebellion Handbook, edited by The Extinction Rebellion, 9-13. London: Penguin.
Knorr Cetina, Karin. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lanser, Susan S. 1992. Fictions of Authority Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1971. “Vaster than Empires and More Slow.” In Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology, edited by Eric S. Rabkin, 494-526. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 434-472.
Leys, Ruth. 2017. The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2016. “The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web.” The New Yorker, August 7, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web.
Marder, Michael. 2012. “Resist like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements.” Peace Studies Journal 5 (1): 24-32.
Margolin, Uri. 2000. “Telling in the Plural: From Grammar to Ideology.” Poetics Today 21 (3): 591-618.
McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Menely, Tobias. 2015. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
O’Key, Dominic. 2020. “Animal Collectives.” Style 54 (1): 74-85.
Palmer, Alan. 2010. Social Minds in the Novel. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ryan, John. 2012. “Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies (HPS).” Societies 2: 101-121.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2007. “Diagramming Narrative.” Semiotica 165 (1/4): 11-40.
Shapton, Leanne. n.d. “The Overstory.” The Booker Prizes. Accessed October 29, 2020. https://thebookerprizes.com/books/overstory-by
Shaviro, Steven. 2016. Discognition. London: Repeater Books.
Simard, Suzanne W. 2016. “How Trees Talk to Each Other.” Audiovisual recording presented June 2016 at the TED Summit, Banff, Canada. https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other#t-203985.
Smith, Robyn. 2009. “Affect, Friendship and the ‘as yet Unknown’: Rat Feeding Experiments in Early Vitamin Research.” In Animal Encounters, edited by Tom Tyler and Manuela S. Rossini, 99-114. Leiden: Brill.
Spengler, Birgit. 2019. “Arboreal Encounters in Richard Powers’s The Overstory.” In An Eclectic Bestiary: Encounters in a More-than-Human World, edited by Birgit Spengler and Babette B. Tischleder, 65-89. Bielefeld: transcript.
Taylor, D. Lee, and Thomas D. Bruns. 1997. “Independent, Specialized Invasions of Ectomycorrhizal Mutualism by Two Nonphotosynthetic Orchids.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (9): 4510-4515.
Thacker, Eugene. 2004. “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part Two).” CTheory. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14541/5388.
Thacker, Eugene. 2011. “Afterlife: Swarms, Demons, and the Antinomies of Immanence.” In Theory after Theory, edited by Jane Elliot and Derek Attridge, 181-193. London: Routledge.
Tsing, Anna. 2013. “Dancing the Mushroom Forest.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 10: 6-14.
Tsing, Anna. 2017. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Wang, Bin, and Yin-Long Qiu. 2006. “Phylogenetic Distribution and Evolution of Mycorrhizas in Land Plants.” Mycorrhiza 16 (5): 299-363.
Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: SAGE.
Wetherell, Margaret. 2015. “Trends in the Turn to Affect: A Social Psychological Critique.” Body & Society 21 (2): 139-166.
Witzany, Günther. 2006. “Plant Communication from a Biosemiotic Perspective: Differences in Abiotic and Biotic Signal Perception Determinate Conent Arrangement of Response Behavior. Context Determines Meaning of Meta-, Inter- and Intra-Organismic Plant Signaling.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 1 (4): 169178.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lambert, S. (2021). ‘Mycorrhizal Multiplicities’: Mapping Collective Agency in Richard Powers’s The Overstory. In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79441-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79442-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)