Abstract
This essay argues that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is an example of how literature, as a narrative that is both reflective and focused on representation, contributes to current circulating debates surrounding the valorisation, productivity and practicality of interdisciplinary knowledge. This essay reads Powers’ novel against the tendency within our society to value literature only on the basis of individual artistic accomplishments. This tendency establishes a boundary between art and science and excludes literature from the realm of a ‘problem-solving’ practicality (Clark 190). As our analysis shows, the novel reflects on the impact and value of interdisciplinary knowledge by presenting a narrative that traces the production and reception of a interdisciplinary work. Additionally, the novel endows the debate about interdisciplinary knowledge with a new light by ‘treeing’ its narrative in both its narratological form and thematic content. It listens to the message of trees as lives mediating between multiple spatial-temporal scales and frames the characters’ sensitivity to this message as a scale awareness. Finally, the interdisciplinary conflicts are read as scale conflicts which the characters in the novel encounter when they try to provide solution to the issue of deforestation.
Highlights
After its publication in 2015, the book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by German forester Peter Wohlleben aroused significant controversy in the scientific field
At the heart of The Overstory is the conflict between an understanding of climate change demanding visions broader and more comprehensive than one particular discipline allows, and the scale conflicts or disastrous scale effects that arise when the interdisciplinary knowledge is put into practical application
While The Overstory affirms the value of interdisciplinary knowledge in moving people into action, the way in which Ray and Neelay engage with knowledge about trees on different scales, as well as the deaths associated with their behavior, points out that its practical implications may not be the positive changes that society desires
Summary
After its publication in 2015, the book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by German forester Peter Wohlleben aroused significant controversy in the scientific field. The Overstory, a novel in which the life and death of human characters are intricately intertwined with the pending issue of deforestation, is his first work framing knowledge production within the crisis of climate change and the literary discourse of ecocriticism.
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