The Time of Chestnuts

This project considers Richard Powers' 2018 novel The Overstory through a digital humanities lens. Using the novel's opening chapter as a case study, I translate narrative detail into data in order to explore the ways in which Powers links human and tree stories, and to what effects.

"That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count. A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning." —The Overstory

My inspiration for this project came simply from being surprised by a book. When I first picked up The Overstory, I felt confronted with an unusual sensibility. One that made me want to read aloud, go outside, take things slower.

I wasn't the only one. Pulitzer Prize aside, the book got people talking. Mainly, critics seem interested in the novel's attention to trees, a notable focus in today's era of global climate crisis but also in the history of the novel as a form.

In her review for The New York Times, Barbara Kingsolver framed the appeal of the book in interesting terms. In The Overstory, the trees are the heroes, not humans. Powers redirects the narrative away from what Georg Lukács called “the biographical form” of the novel, which centers the experience of the individual in the modern world. If Powers indeed managed to escape such anthropocentric concerns through his focus on trees, then he has accomplished something quite extraordinary within the context of the novel's history. But has he?

"Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size." --Barbara Kingsolver for The New York Times

My research question arose from these celebrations of the radical effect of Powers' most recent novel: Does he in fact escape the anthropocentrism that has long defined novelistic realism? And if so, how? At what moments are trees—often delegated as background—foregrounded? And how is human experience demoted in turn?

From a more practical side, I wondered how one might go about quantifying something like a "vast, primordial sensibility?" Using as a starting point the resources of literary narrative, how might one track and measure something like the deep time of trees?

I initially conceived of this project as an analysis of the whole novel, but limited my scope to the first "chapter" for the purposes of this project (approximately 23 pages). In this way, I could commit to the method of close reading for data gathering rather than rely on machine-reading techniques. Though I'm curious as to what a tool like Voyant would yield in working with this novel, I wanted to attend to a more granular level of the narrative in this early, exploratory phase.

• Initial focus: how much of the text is devoted to trees? How are these trees represented? And in how much space (i.e.: page/word count)? Where do humans interact with trees, and in what manner?
• Reframed focus: how does the novel situate us in space and time? What narrative markers orient us to a certain mode of temporal experience related to human history?
• Data gathering approach: close reading, pulling dates, researching historic references, reconstructing timelines based on minor details linked to characters.
• With only 7 references to specific dates in the opening chapter, I created a dataset of nearly 60 timestamps.
• Tools: Google sheets, TimelineJS, RAWGraphs

By focusing on markers of time, I wanted to track just how much human history is presented in this opening section, and what kind. Notably, the story of the Hoel family originates in European settler colonialism and westward expansion in the mid-19th century, when Jørgen Hoel emigrates from Norway, arrives in Brooklyn, and then travels west.

In telling this history, Powers foregrounds the experience of the settler but also radically condenses it, treating six generations and 125 years of history in the space of only 23 pages such that human events indeed feel "whittled down to size," as per Kingsolver. Not only do sudden, unceremonious deaths befall the Hoel patriarchs, but their lived experiences are intimately linked to issues of ecological devastation in the form of blight, deforestation, and industrial agriculture.

In addition to its condensation, the human history on display becomes unexpectedly routed through contact with the living history of a single tree. Planted by Jørgen in 1856, the Hoel Chestnut develops alongside six generations of Hoels, inspiring a 76-year family ritual of photographing the tree once a month. The photos are compiled as a flipbook consisting of nearly 1,000 photos that allows the tree to be "sped up to the rate of human desire" (11).

Reading the novel's opening section, I felt this speed of human desire, but also the slower, more primordial "speed of wood" (16). My work in TimelineJS is an effort to represent the coming together of these two distinct temporalities in the early moments of the novel. The result is a characteristically linear account of the forward march of human progress periodically interrupted by the "ironclad law of Now" (9) in the form of the stoic resilience of trees.

• What's missing from this timeline? What histories are absented? The next phase of this project would ideally include an alternate timeline to the colonial view that Powers foregrounds.
• I hope this project will act as a springboard for my larger goal of understanding whether and how this novel transcends anthropocentric concerns to attend to the alterity of trees and forests, especially in relation to questions of scale and time. What kind of data model would allow me to track ways in which time is sped up or slowed down in the narrative to convey different scales of human vs. geologic time?
• Ultimately, I'd love to expand this project to treat the novel as a whole. This would likely call for machine-reading techniques considering it's a 500-page novel. While I think such techniques could yield interesting results, I'd also want to consider how such methods may conflict with the focus of my study, i.e.: attending to the sensibility of trees separate from their industrial utility.