Arboreal Obliquity or Trees Doing the Human in Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus

Abstract

ABSTRACT Tapping into Australian writing on arboreality, with a focus on Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus (1998), this investigation intervenes in Critical Plant Studies by exploring a dendrographic alternative to both extrinsic and intrinsic plant language and representation. The aim is to remediate the “doing of trees” one finds at work in approaches ranging from botanical taxonomy to literary arborealism. Set on breaking nature’s silence, the urge in much arboreal writing has been to get trees to speak. By contrast, Bail’s trees are stumm; there is no direct human/arboreal rapport. Instead, Eucalyptus is driven by what I term arboreal obliquity, a mode of narration that allows the trees to articulate their arboreality by “doing the human” without relying on human ventriloquy. At the same time as Bail portrays his eucalypts as resolutely aloof, he shows all human life in his novel to depend for its impetus in one way or another on the trees. Arboreal obliquity installs a lens that casts a distinctively arboreal light, instantiating Patrícia Vieira’s phytographia which implies that plants compose and sustain, and thus write, the human lifeworld. Arboreal obliquity is invested in a radical decentering of the human, away from eco-materialist notions of human/nonhuman parity, enmeshment and interdependence.