Remaking the Sense(s) in Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree: A Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

Representing the senses in a text is a complex issue, given the difficulty of expressing embodied perceptions, but in some cases it can be instrumental in the organisation of discourse (Diaconu, Reflections on an Aesthetics of Touch, Smell, and Taste, Contemporary Aesthetics 4. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/ca/7523862.0004.008/%2D%2Dreflections-on-an-aesthetics-of-touch-smell-and-taste?rgn=main;view=fulltext, 2006; Nuessel, Semiotica 222 (April 25): 101–112, 2018). Sumana Roy’s How I Became a Tree (2017) is an innovative non-fictional narrative, blending genres as different as memoir, literary history and botanical scholarship, in which the author deliberately challenges the reader to adopt a new perspective by harmonising the human and the non-human, epitomised by trees and plants. Provocatively, the writer metamorphosises human senses thanks to various linguistic resources, in order to elaborate a new ideology pertaining to the environment, and the very meaning of life on the planet. The text borrows references to plants from the Indian landscape to put forward a fresh idea of sensation, affecting touch, sight and hearing, which reconceptualises and recalibrates human life by means of non-standard collocations, synaesthetic metaphorical patterns, and other rhetorical devices.

Drawing on ecolinguistics, ecostylistics, and metaphor studies (Gavins, Text World Theory. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 146–164; Stibbe, Ecolinguistics. Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live by. London: Routledge, 2015; Virdis, Ecological Stylistics: Ecostylistic Approaches to Discourses of Nature, the Environment and Sustainability. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), this chapter investigates how the depiction of the senses triggered by the homodiegetic narrator generates sense within a project that realigns the understanding of the environment. In particular, the analysis attempts to shed light on the construction, meaning and effect of non-standard innovative expressions and images about trees and the senses, also suggesting how specialised discourse (e.g. botany or philosophy) contributes to mapping out the (non-)human emerging from natural forces and phenomena.