l inda m. h ess The Aesthetics of Wonder: Networks of the Grievable in Richard Powers’ The Overstory The fact that The Overstory by Richard Powers is represented within the select, carefully curated library of “publications on the environmental humanities” in the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society 1 is a good indicator of its status as a notable work of environmental fiction, which it quickly achieved upon its publication in April 2018� The heightened attention the novel received from the get-go is certainly due in part to the established fame of its author, but also, indubitably, to the timeliness of its topic� Whether categorized as (new) nature writing, climate fiction (cli-fi), or environmental literature, works that focus on nature, the environment, and ideas of the Anthropocene 2 have clustered into a defining genre of the early twenty-first century. When Powers’ novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in April 2019, The Washington Post observed that this moment marked “a new high point in the growing prominence of environmental novels” (Charles, n. pag.); a high point that has also been reflected in other prominent authors’ recent treatments of environmental topics, such as Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), or Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016)� Margaret Atwood, quoted on the hardback’s jacket, compares Powers to “the Herman Melville of Moby Dick” because “His picture is that big�” The novel indeed presents an extensive and elaborate network, not only of nine 1 The Rachel Carson Center was founded in 2009, jointly by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Deutsches Museum in Munich� It focuses primarily on research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences� 2 While the term “nature” is of course complex, in this essay it generally designates non-human nature� The term “Anthropocene” was coined by scientists who believe that humans have altered Earth’s geology and ecosystems in such a lasting way that we now live in a new epoch that is no longer the Holocene� While the term has not (yet) been officially adopted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy or the International Union of Geological Sciences, it has become a buzzword in discussions about climate change in various fields, including the environmental humanities. In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (2018) Simon L� Lewis and Mark A� Maslin propose four possible starting points for the Anthropocene: a) over 10,000 years ago, when humans became farmers; b) around 1492, with the Columbian exchange and Western Colonization; c) the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century; or d) the period after World War II, also known as the Great Acceleration (11-12). Some geologists have proposed the first nuclear bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 as a specific official beginning of the Anthropocene because of the subsequent “stratigraphic presence of radioactive elements” (Monastersky 146)� 190 l inda m. h ess characters’ stories, but also of its other, in many ways overarching protagonists: trees� 3 Powers returns to themes here that have previously characterized his works� Jan Kucharzewski has traced networks in Gain (1998) while pointing out that they also “feature prominently” in other works by Powers (125)� Moreover, scholars such as Heather Houser, Laura Bieger, Greg Garrard, and Ursula Heise have called attention to ecocritical perspectives in Powers’ works� However, in The Overstory the author entangles these elements further to re-envision human relations to the non-human in the age of climate change on a different scale� The novel demands of its readers nothing less than serious contemplation of a new perspective on the world—one in which humans are not the telos of the intricate webs of being, and in which plants, not people, may be the possessors and professors of significant knowledge. In The Overstory, people really only form the understory, the underlying layer of vegetation, above which the trees soar� Heinz Ickstadt has noted that “the function of Powers’ structures and constructions is to a great extent appellative … meant to affect the reader, to change his/ her awareness” (29), and that each of Powers’ narratives professes an “intimate connection between content and the linguistic shape it takes: as if each story generated its own appropriate form” (29)� Both characteristics persist in The Overstory� I argue that in this novel Powers uses narrative strategies to create grievable nature; to bring about a recognition of nature, and an understanding of trees as creatures with which, as humans, we are more intricately connected than we commonly consider, creatures for which we should grieve, if they were lost� He achieves this effect via a network aesthetics that serves to evoke a sense of wonder, which serves in turn to render nature grievable, that is, too valuable to be lost� This grievabilty is particularly emphasized in a sentence that recurs—with slight variations—nine times in the novel� It presents an observation and a plea, to the characters as well as to readers: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (Powers, The Overstory 165)� 4 To tackle grievable nature in The Overstory, I first propose that the concept of grievability, which I transpose from Judith Butler’s writing on grievable lives, can serve as a productive concept for the analysis of environmental writing and may expand profound ecofeminist insights without risking the essentialism inherent in models such as the “ethic of care” (MacGregor 61- 65)� I then elaborate on how the aesthetics of wonder via an emphasis on networks pervade and shape Powers’ narrative and serve to create grievable nature on the page� Lastly, I illustrate that Powers’ narrative self-referentially discusses the mechanisms—or frames, as Butler calls them—of grievability with a specific focus on the way in which narratives may construct and embody such frames� 3 In an interview at Shakespeare and Company in September 2018, Powers mentioned that he “name-check[s] about three hundred trees” in the pages of The Overstory. 4 Hereafter cited as TO in the text. The Aesthetics of Wonder 191 What Counts as Livable Life and Grievable Death? 5 In 2004 Judith Butler published Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, and in 2009 Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Both works investigate the mechanisms and processes through which life becomes intelligible as life worth sustaining� Butler argues that all life is precarious and that all life depends on outward conditions to sustain it� She states, “Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live� Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear� Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters” (Butler, Frames 14)� However, realities such as war illustrate that not all life is equal� She observes, “Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as ‘grievable’” (Butler, Precarious 32)� There are lives considered “not quite lives” and thus “cast as ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’” (Butler, Frames 31)� 6 I propose to transpose the concept of grievability onto nature� While the fact that in our anthropocentric worldview a host of human lives are not considered grievable certainly complicates an extension of this concept beyond the human, the fact that “being human” and “grievable life” are by no means automatically equated renders this extension highly useful for inquiring into mechanisms of grievability� Butler herself highlights that her considerations of grievability are not focused on “whether the being in question has the status of a ‘person,’” but are rather concerned with the question of “whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible” (Frames 20) and with our obligations “to sustain life as sustainable” (23)� Renee Lertzman has argued that “In contrast to losing a person … environmental loss can be far more amorphous, particularly in a culture that does not recognize it as valid” (6)� In 2017, Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman published Mourning Nature, a collection of essays on grief born from the loss of nature, in which they emphatically underline the importance of comprehending the extension of grief and mourning “beyond the human” (3), particularly given the current realities of climate change and environmental destruction� Importantly, this grief does not solely touch past losses� Butler emphasizes that projections of the “future anterior” form an essential condition for grievability (Frames 15). Lertzman, in turn, points specifically to “environmental loss [as] ‘anticipatory’ [… ], insofar as we are mourning for loss that is likely to come” (6)� 5 Butler, Precarious xv. 6 Butler names racism as a mechanism that produces ungrievable lives: “Forms of racism instituted and active at the level of perception tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss and who remain ungrievable” (Frames 24). As another example she names “those killed in the current wars […] including those the US has killed” (Butler, Frames 39)� 192 l inda m. h ess Anticipating loss has been a central part of nature writing and environmental writing in the past—for example in the works of Rachel Carson, John Muir, and Sarah Orne Jewett, or that of Frederick Olmsted arguing for protection of “wilderness” in his “Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove” 7 —which frequently tap into such anticipation of loss, pleading that nature should not be “cast as ‘destructible,’” as Butler has termed it (Frames 31). It has also become prominent in works of science fiction and speculative fiction with environmental themes, which use such anticipation for example in what has come to be known as the “if-this-goes-on story” (Octavia Butler qtd. in Canavan and Robinson 13). As such examples show, grievability, even when explicitly focused on grievable nature, is still intricately bound to human perception� Nevertheless, the concept provides new ways to think through human-nonhuman relations and to consider the conditions that sustain life� In some cases grievability results solely from the loss of nature as a loss to humans (as symbol of national greatness or as foundation of human life)� In other cases, such as Carson’s or Powers’, it in fact means recognizing nature as life in its own right� The observation that humans form deep emotional connections with nature holds a long-established and prominent place in ecofeminism, especially when it comes to questions of care� However, I hope that the concept of grievability might avoid some of the pitfalls of the “ethic of care,” popular in some strands of ecofeminism� Sherilyn MacGregor points out the problematic of uncritically adopting the position that women (often automatically understood as mothers) are instinctual caretakers and therefore better equipped to care for nature (61-64). She argues that “care is not an unqualified good” (61) but one that frequently signifies “self-sacrifice, exploitation, and loss of autonomy and leisure time” (63). Grievability expresses an emotional connection and a responsibility—which may translate into an “ethics that rests upon an apprehension of the precariousness of life, one that begins with the precariousness of the life of the Other” (Butler, Precarious xvii-xviii) without tying this ethics to gender in an essentializing way� The Overstory extends grievability as “apprehension of the precariousness of life” beyond the human� Powers does this in particular by emphasizing the myriad connections among humans and trees, and by transporting a sense of wonder at these creatures, for the ways in which their behavior resembles that of humans 8 and for the ways in which they exceed humanity’s limited existence. At the same time the novel presents a narrative that is invested in exploring mechanisms of grievability. 7 The report speaks of “the certainty — that without care many of the species of plants now flourishing upon it will be lost and many interesting objects be defaced or obscured if not destroyed” (Olmsted)� 8 Thus grievable nature is nevertheless tied to human perception� The Aesthetics of Wonder 193 There Are No Individuals in a Forest, No Separable Events 9 The Overstory expands Powers’ previous focus on ecocritical themes, particularly through the use of network imagery to transport its aesthetics of wonder� Network structures pervade the narrative, as a formal device and as metaphor� On the one hand, Powers uses the network to illustrate connections on the content-level, between characters whose storylines intersect, between humans and the non-human environment, and among trees� On the other hand, Powers, who once termed the novel itself “a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking we’ve developed” (“The Last Generalist” 104), uses the network as infrastructure, zooming in and out of storylines, fluctuating between the bigger picture and the small detail, so that sometimes readers observe individual moments of connection—the nodes of the network—and sometimes are confronted with overwhelming bird’s-eye views that suggest the expanse and fluidity of these innumerable connections� This technique taps into the general prominence of networks in the twenty-first century. In a 2015 special issue of American Studies on Network Theory and American Studies, the articles collected by Ulfried Reichardt, Heike Schäfer, and Regina Schober attest to the network as “a central concept and metaphor of our time” (12)� Elsewhere, Sianne Ngai emphasizes that since the 1960s the network has transformed into a primary concept for envisioning the world (“Network Aesthetics” 367-368)� Unsurprisingly, the concept is especially fruitful for ecocritics, for whom the focus on connections and interrelations has gained a special currency in the face of accelerating climate change in a globalized world� Moreover, given the long-standing central concern of ecology “with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments” and the “totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment” (“Ecology”), the prominence of networks in The Overstory appears an organic choice� The novel embodies Emanuele Coccia’s tenet that we must understand that “[t]he world is not a place; it is a state of immersion of each thing in all other things” (67)� Her argument lays out the route to understanding via rescinding our zoocentric worldview: “To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world” (Coccia 5)� In The Overstory, the narrative sets out to interrogate plants: readers are called to pay attention to and marvel at the networks that trees form, individually and collectively� From the communities that trees build, to the myriad interactions that take place within these communities, to the communication with other life forms— readers are meant to recognize in such networks life forms equal to their own� Divided into four sections named “Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds,” the novel begins by introducing, chapter by chapter, its nine human protagonists: Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Metha, Patricia Westerford, and Olivia 9 Powers, TO 218� 194 l inda m. h ess Vandergriff� If The Overstory were a piece of music, its opening section might best compare to Bedřich Smetana’s symphonic poem “The Moldau,” which begins with light, rippling figures that represent the emergence of the Moldau River as two mountain springs, one warm and one cold� Water from the springs then combines to become a mighty river, symbolized by a thickly orchestrated, stately theme that recurs periodically throughout the remainder of the work� (Schwarm, n� pag�) In The Overstory nine springs combine� In section two, “Trunk,” they mingle and part, and the comparison to musical composition sustains itself since the storylines of the different figures weave in and out, like counterpoints moving through different voices, and yet all the while developing a common theme. The characters’ connections are first announced towards the end of section one, “Roots,” by the floating authorial narrative voice, which, zooming out from the details, gives readers a glimpse of the bigger picture, foreshadowing developments to come� This voice remarks that the other eight characters, who go about their lives in various parts of the United States, “are nothing to Plant-Patty [Patricia Westerford’s childhood nickname],” but that nevertheless “their lives have long been connected, deep underground� Their kinship will work like an unfolding book” (Powers, TO 132)� As the book unfolds, some of the characters meet in person� Nick, Olivia, Mimi, Doug, and Adam join the same environmental activist group� Olivia, after a near-death experience, becomes the group’s spiritual leader. Nick and Olivia become lovers� Doug and Mimi develop an intense friendship� Others will remain loosely connected� Patricia Westerford grows up to become a dendrologist who researches communication between trees� First ridiculed by fellow scientists, her findings and her name are later redeemed, and she writes The Secret Forest, a book that all eight other characters read� Neelay and Mimi hear her speak in person on one occasion� Dorothy and Ray read about the actions of the environmental activists in the newspaper� But each of the nine has a special connection with trees, and each is connected with a specific tree: chestnut, mulberry, fir, maple, gingko, oak, linden, beech, redwood� A black and white drawing of the respective tree leaf accompanies the beginning of each character’s chapter in the “Roots” section� And the trees turn out to be protagonists in their own right, anchor points for the humans, messengers, survivors, “most wondrous” beings whose communities and communication exist mostly outside the radar of human perception. Already on the first page of the novel, trees are said to speak, remember, gossip, laugh, “in the lowest frequencies,” which almost completely evade humans (Powers, TO 5)� 10 10 Powers’ anthropomorphic portrayal of the trees might be seen as problematic because it recreates the human perspective as the central one� I would rather propose that Powers ‘ depiction might bring readers to question whether what we have thought of as human traits are actually exclusive to humans. Moreover, Powers’ choice of depiction emphasizes that the recognition of similarities and feelings of kinship are essential ways that produce empathy in the human species� Powers purposefully focuses on similarities, not differences� He also does so when he depicts the A�I� “learners” as The Aesthetics of Wonder 195 Patricia Westerford’s research, which becomes the central node that ties the nine humans together, illuminates the communal networks of trees� She first realizes the connections between individual trees when she researches maples that are invaded by insects: The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives� That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked� Something alerts them� They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare� […] The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell� Her maples are signaling� They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland� (Powers, TO 125-126, emphasis in original) Here the trees are portrayed at once as agents linked in a network and as one organism, like an immune system, leading to the following insight: “Everything in the forest, is the forest” (142)� As Patricia keeps researching, more awe-inspiring facts surface: The things she catches Douglas-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse� Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one� Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests� (142) The networks among trees are time and again used to emphasize their connectedness to each other as well as their collective intelligence� In another strand of the narrative, that of Neelay Metha, such imagery is doubled by a number of images of the Internet, the network that has become our prime concept for thinking about networks� More precisely, coding and non-linear online gaming are at the center of Neelay’s storyline� The son of Indian immigrants, Neelay begins building his first computer with his father at age seven� A few years later, he falls from a tree and becomes paralyzed, henceforth immersing himself completely in ever more complex coding. He witnesses and participates in digital evolution: Everything unfolds as Neelay foresaw it years ago� Browsers appear—yet another nail in the coffin of time and space. A click, and you’re at CERN. Another, and you’re listening to underground music from Santa Cruz� One more, and you can read a newspaper at MIT� […] The Web goes from unimaginable to indispensable, weaving the world together in eighteen months� (Powers, TO 276, emphasis in original) curious� The effect of these depictions is that humans and non-human creatures (forgive the binary) are all imagined as part of a much larger network, rather than putting an unbridgeable divide between the human and the non-human� 196 l inda m. h ess Using readers’ familiarity with the intricacies and reach of the Internet as “today’s master network” (Reichardt 21), Powers channels the marvel at nature via our habitual marveling at technology� When Neelay lies under the tree, his back shattered from his fall, looking upward, he sees [a] colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see� (Powers, TO 103, my emphasis) Later on, the parallel is emphasized further when Neelay marvels at a redwood tree: “Think of the Code that made this gigantic thing […]� How many cells inside? How many programs is it running? ” (197). Code—in trees and in computers—propels evolution; “the branch wants only to go on branching,” unfolding the network further and further (197)� What the web and trees share is collective intelligence—the network is necessary� Towards the end of the narrative simple browsers grow into complex algorithms in the same way that a grown tree branches out from a single seed. Collecting data all over the planet, artificial intelligence evolves. Powers names the bots the “invisible learners” who “preserve every single word and fit them into branching networks of sense that grow stronger with each addition” (TO 471)� The procedure is very close to the description that Patricia Westerford gives of trees and forests in her last public lecture� She claims, A forest knows things� They wire themselves up underground� There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see� Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions� Fungal synapses� What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware� (453, emphasis in original) These mirroring images of networks exemplify what Ngai has called “network aesthetics” in describing “an aesthetics that revolves around connection and information” (“Network Aesthetics” 368)� An important characteristic of network aesthetics is elusiveness� Ultimately, networks can be traced, but as a whole they escape comprehension. Their complexity results in “The narrative task” of continuously tracing “ties between a radically heterogeneous multiplicity of individual actors” (373)� The actors converging in The Overstory are both human and non-human� Powers’ network aesthetics trace various developments, trajectories, and life courses, allowing readers glimpses of the immensity of the network, the whole of which, however, cannot be grasped� The network not only expands but also multiplies in points of connection because in The Overstory connectedness is no longer limited to human interactions; it includes diverse forms of intelligence. This expansion and multiplication create a sense of being overwhelmed, but this sense is one of awe and wonder, not of disoriented anxiety. The language of the narrative suggests more than once that trees not only have agency, but also weave plans in dimensions that are beyond human understanding� This has the potential The Aesthetics of Wonder 197 to produce anxiety or paranoia, but the narrative’s portrayal of trees as creatures that might be not only on par with, but actually superior to humans, is paired not with fear, but with admiration, curiosity, and awe� The Overstory, rather than indulging in any illusion of giving us a complete picture of the network, provides us with an inkling of how many parts of the network we cannot quite grasp, and may always be missing� This effect resembles the way that gazing at a star directly in the night sky will make it disappear from our vision, whereas looking at it aslant will make it just barely perceptible in our peripheral vision� In this allusion to something greater, Powers’ narrative situates itself within existing traditions, in particular those of American Romanticism and of transcendentalist thought� As Regina Schober has observed, network imagery was already central to American philosophy and literature of the late nineteenth century and among the Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson� The aesthetics of awe and wonder Powers expresses in The Overstory are reminiscent of the emphasis Emerson puts on the metaphysical link of “individual experience” to “universal experience through a sense of divine interconnectedness” (Schober 101), an idea that he elaborates in his essay “The Over-Soul�” Powers’ link to Emerson is highlighted further through the shared preposition in their titles, The Overstory and “The Over-Soul,” which denotes the central significance of a connection that is larger than individual human existence (and comprehension) for both texts. The Living World’s Most Wondrous Creatures 11 In some ways, The Overstory evokes the sublime� As Philip Shaw states, “In broad terms, whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison disappear, then we resort to the feeling of the sublime” (2, emphasis in original)� The melding of awe and terror in the sublime surely seems to fit the moment when Neelay, having plummeted out of the tree, looks up into its branches, which appear at once to be “praying and threatening” (Powers, TO 103)� This ambiguous motion is paired with the question “whether the tree had it in for him” (103)� Likewise awe-inspiring is the sheer scale of the picture Powers provides when he sweeps readers along the networking processes driven by trees: the “ingenious designs that loft seeds in the air for hundreds of miles� The tricks of propagation worked upon unsuspecting mobile things tens of millions of years younger than the trees� The bribes for animals who think they’re getting lunch for free” (294)� Yet the simpler term “wonder” fits this narrative because it invokes not only crushing and engulfing sensations, but also a fellow feeling, a “kinship” that ultimately forms the basis of grievability� Houser, in her analysis of Powers earlier novel Gain, observes, “For the environmental thinkers who take inspiration from Thoreau and company, wonder is also what 11 Powers, TO 348� 198 l inda m. h ess converts inquiry into care for our astounding and increasingly threatened surroundings” (78)� This observation applies to Powers, who uses a quotation of Thoreau as one of three epigraphs of The Overstory, as well as to his human protagonists, many of whom read Thoreau and other environmental thinkers repeatedly� Within the novel “and company” also refers to Patricia Westerford, whose own book The Secret Forest does much to stir wonder in its readers (both internal and external to the novel). Incidentally, The Secret Forest begins with a recollection of kinship: “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes” (Powers, TO 268, emphasis in original)� Other characters pick up the kinship theme� Olivia Vandergriff, who, after a near-death experience, changes from self-indulgent student to environmental activist, voices the thought that “plants are persons, too” (Powers, TO 319) to Adam Apich, the skeptical grad student of psychology who has come to interview her for his study on what motivates environmentalists� Olivia points out to him that the real focus of his study should instead be “everyone who thinks that only people matter” (319), inverting the presumed anomaly� The point is further emphasized when The Overstory portrays trees as sentient beings with “intention” (Powers, TO 283)� That trees are generally not perceived as possessing intelligence is clearly attributed to the limited perspective of humans, “who miss the half of it, and more� There is always as much belowground as above” (4)� The Overstory plays with perspective, suggesting new ways to consider trees, including seeing them as fellow creatures� Patricia Westerford insists that “trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them� This isn’t mystical� The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other” (454)� Another aspect of this shift in perspective is introduced via Ray Brinkman, the property lawyer, who reads a legal article entitled “Should Trees Have Standing? ” consequently puzzling over the ensuing questions: “What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them? ” (249)� The lines that defend the argument—“The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time” (250, emphasis in original)-allude to Christopher D� Stone’s real-life treatise Should Trees Have Legal Standing? (2010)� What becomes central for the narrative, as it prompts its characters time and again to adopt such perspectives, is that it also places a demand on readers: to take the characters’ wonder seriously� When Olivia and Nick stumble upon awe-inspiring sights in the forest, the line between artifice and accident blurs: The redwoods do strange things� They hum� They radiate arcs of force� Their burls spill out in enchanted shapes� She grabs his shoulder� “Look at that! ” Twelve apostle trees stand in a fairy ring as perfect as the circles little Nicky once drew with a protractor on rainy Sundays decades ago� Centuries after their ancestor’s death, a dozen basal clones surround the empty center, all around the compass rose� A The Aesthetics of Wonder 199 chemical semaphore passes through Nick’s brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand� That single work would be a landmark of human art� (Powers, TO 254) The exclamation “Look at that! ” interpellates readers as witnesses to the scene. The narrative seeks to affect readers, prompting them to adjust their vision so that they might share Olivia’s wonder� She perceives “The air around her spark[ing] with connections� The presences light around her, singing new songs� The world starts here. This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea” (165, emphasis in original)� Calling on readers to witness as well as to partake in the awe and wonder of the characters is central to The Overstory. It is due to this interpellation that Powers’ novel can be seen as taking part in a mode of writing that became known, through David Foster Wallace’s 1993 article “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U�S� Fiction,” as the mode of new sincerity� New sincerity turns away from poststructuralist play and from the postmodern centrality of irony� 12 In its simultaneous turn to earnest, unironic feeling, new sincerity can easily be regarded as a “natural” mode of environmental writing� 13 Those who hope to convey sincere (and urgent) messages—such as “Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together” (Powers, TO 281), or “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (165)—have to count on conveying their sincerity to their audience� As Johannes Voelz explains, because sincerity is first of all “a speech act [that] must persuade the listener as being sincere from the way it is uttered” (215), such persuasiveness is a matter of employing “a credible style or aesthetic” (215)� The Overstory turns away from postmodern aesthetic categories such as “the zany, the interesting, and the cute,” which Ngai has posited as the prime aesthetic categories of “the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (Our Aesthetic Categories 1), and which govern “not only specific capacities for feeling and acting but also specific ways of relating to other subjects” (11). Powers’ aesthetics demand other forms of relating: those of awe and wonder� Nevertheless, like those aesthetic categories Ngai lists, they are meant to call “forth specific powers of feeling, knowing, and acting” (233)� The narrative prompts readers not only to consider in earnest the proposition that trees are agents with intentionality, but also—and this is perhaps the more difficult feat-to take at face value the un-ironic passion for nature that the characters present to us� And, as if anticipating resistance, Powers addresses this point directly via one of his characters� When Adam 12 Several authors have made note of Powers’ avoidance of post-structuralist modes� Nathaniel Reich calls Powers a “novelist in the grand realist tradition” and a “historian of contemporary society” (n� pag�)� In his analysis of Galatea 2.2., Jan Kucharzewski points out that Powers forgoes “engaging in a typical postmodern play with decentralized and self-consuming textual labyrinths” (69). 13 However, for anyone who has looked at, for example, Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction, such as the MaddAddam trilogy, it is clear that irony can be a mode of environmental writing as well� 200 l inda m. h ess officially joins the environmental protesters in an inaugural ceremony for new members, initially feeling repelled at the group’s “virtuous songs” and “platitudes,” he nevertheless cannot choose but wonder, “Maybe mass extinction justifies a little fuzziness. Maybe earnestness can help his hurt species as much as anything” (Powers, TO 335)� In this way, the narrative includes a meta-level reflection on its own mode of sincerity, creating a double vision which pairs a larger awareness of The Overstory as narrative with an immersion in the characters’ storylines and their sincere caring� After the giant redwood, named Mimas by the environmental activists, is cut down despite the activists’ best efforts, Olivia “touches the edge of the wondrous cut and breaks down sobbing” with grief over the loss (Powers, TO 330)� Olivia, Nick, Mimi, Douglas, and Adam lock themselves to machines, are violently harassed by the police, are gravely injured, swear oaths to defend “the common cause of living things” (336)—all out of the candid conviction that people and trees are deeply connected, “are in this together” (339). Despite her aversion to public appearances, Patricia testifies in court in order to halt deforestation because “she loves them, these intricate, reciprocal nations of tied-together life that she has listened to all life long” (282, emphasis in original)� Over and over the narrative earnestly asks, “What wouldn’t a person do, to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of creation? ” (345)� Powers’ language, moreover, furthers the personification of trees. The giant redwood, Mimas, is described as “the largest, strongest, wisest, oldest, surest, sanest living thing” (Powers, TO 262), and when Olivia gets the loggers waiting to fell the tree to use the name, it is “a small victory” (287), signifying a small step towards grievability� The spray-painted white numbers that Nick and Olivia find on trees in the forest ordered to be cut down become “[o]rders for a massacre” (254)� When Ray and Dorothy read about the chestnut blight that hit North America in the early twentieth century, this is described as a “holocaust that ravaged the landscape just before they were born” (442)� There is probably no word in the English language that is more strongly associated with mourning and that marks collective grievability as fervently� The Overstory proposes a post-humanist view as a post-anthropocentric one—humans are no longer at the center of this perspective on the world� They are part of a much larger network� Trees command the human protagonists to look, to listen, to try to understand, however inept their attempts may be� Powers’ trees are agents with their own intentionality, mysterious creatures that are at risk of being lost before humans have learned to interpret their signals, and his narrative composition seeks to make this loss intelligible as grievable� The Aesthetics of Wonder 201 What Is Needed Is a Myth 14 Claire Miye Sanford captures the self-referential qualities of The Overstory when she writes, “Powers is not only invested in writing from the perspective of trees but also in exploring what it means to write from the perspective of trees” (n� pag�)� Regarding this duality from a slightly different angle, I read it as Powers’ interest in creating grievable nature through writing� Simultaneously, his writing investigates the place of narratives in the negotiation of human-nonhuman relations, and it asks what this role may become in the current age of climate change� Compelling storylines are often the ones that tie in with values we already hold and narratives in which we are already invested as a culture� One of the already established narrative routes of affiliation between trees and people that The Overstory points to is myth� When Adam muses, “trees used to talk to people all the time� Sane people used to hear them” (Powers, TO 432), he paints a mythic, primeval connection, once vibrant, now lapsed� Powers’ narrative nudges readers to reconsider myth when he narrates the life of humans as deeply entangled with that of trees� When young Patricia receives a “bowdlerized version” of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from her father, she is immediately captivated by its opening phrase: “Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things” (117)� The story that holds her attention most is that of Daphne turning into a tree� Later on, the environmental activists give themselves tree names—“Maidenhair,” “Doug-fir,” “Maple”—and name the giant redwood they seek to protect “Mimas,” a son of Gaia (Mother Earth goddess) in Greek mythology� The narrative is sprinkled with other myths more specifically tied to America, beginning with the image on The Overstory’s hardcover book jacket, which also accentuates The Overstory’s connection to American romanticism� The cover shows a painting entitled Cathedral Forest, by Albert Bierstadt, the nineteenth-century painter whose art glorified the American West. In a similar vein, the characters are inspired by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir’s musings about the American wilderness (124). When Nick and Olivia come across “a grove of trunks six hundred years old, running upward out of sight,” these are dubbed “pillars of a russet cathedral nave” (254), a description that taps into the American history of wilderness preservation as a form of nation-building� As Alfred Runte has put it, “the natural marvels of the West compensated for America’s lack of old cities, [and] aristocratic traditions” (168)� Wilderness, which “had no counterpart in the Old World” (Nash 67), was to become that unique characteristic of the American nation. Mimi’s first-generation immigrant father knows no greater pleasure in America than to elaborately plan and document the family’s annual trips to America’s national parks (Powers, TO 36)� The outrage of Douglas and the other environmental protesters is incited by the destruction of the last untouched trees in national forests� Adam has a vision of downtown Manhattan as primordial forest: “Arboretum America” (463)� When Nick and Olivia camp out on top of the giant redwood in order 14 Powers, TO 252� 202 l inda m. h ess to save it, they are “high-wire surveyors of a newfound land” (264), and their outlook on the California landscape is described as a view of “America’s Eden” containing “last pocket relics of Jurassic forest, a world like nothing else on Earth” (319)� Wonder is therefore often connected to forms of nature that American cultural history has already taught us to value� While including these allusions, between the lines, the narrative prompts the following questions: What is it exactly that we are grieving for? Through which frames is grievability achieved? In Should Trees Have Legal Standing, Stone writes that for trees to be viewed in a new light by humanity, what is needed is a new myth (in the Barthesian sense), a narrative that compellingly transmits a world-view (29)� But changing myths in which masses of people are currently invested is not an easy game� Neelay’s highly successful Mastery proves it� His players crave “an uninhabited world,” a “virgin world” where they can build up empires as “frontiersmen, pilgrims, farmers, miners, warriors, priests” (Powers, TO 198, 275)� When Neelay proposes, after eight new incarnations of the game, to introduce limits to Mastery’s game-world—“No new continents� No sudden spawning of new mineral deposits� Regeneration only at realistic rates” (413)—his project managers doubt his sanity� They are certain he will “crash the franchise” and unanimously veto the idea (413)� The question of what role narration plays in creating grievability may be the novel’s own overstory, the canopy that spans The Overstory on the metalevel� Powers has one of his characters remark, “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind� The only thing that can do that is a good story” (TO 336), only to have another character proclaim about fifty pages later that “To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one” and that “no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people” (383, emphasis in original)� Powers does not give us a satisfying story (maybe to avoid the illusion of ready-made meaning)� The consequences of the protagonists’ actions remain uncertain� Actions such as sitting on top of a tree, protesting in the streets, and putting oneself in harm’s way on behalf of nature begin to frustrate the protagonists because they do not yield results in proportion to the sacrifices. Even the drastic step of Patricia’s self-immolation at a public lecture seems ineffective and short-sighted� One night, Nick dreams that “the trees laugh at them� Save us? What a human thing to do” (329, emphasis in original)� Thus, activism does not win the day� No children are introduced as beacons of hope for the immediate future� 15 People die, are incarcerated, or proceed with their lives in unassuming ways, allowing no unambiguous conclusions as to whether they have made the world a better place� The “learners,” the algorithms busily collecting all data, may be the new species on the horizon, an unexpected incarnation of the story Neelay has always loved: “Aliens land on Earth� They operate on a different scale of time� They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans” (Powers, 15 Heteronormative futurity is a myth that Powers avoids� For this and other reasons, temporality in The Overstory certainly merits a paper of its own� The Aesthetics of Wonder 203 TO 487)� And yet, whether they will remain, whether they will replace humanity, or whether nature will simply grow back is left open to time passing� Ultimately, The Overstory performs its own attempt to make the contest for the world as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people, and thus to render the world, the environment, nature, grievable� Does this mean that Powers falls for a romantic vision of the “ability of poetry to re-enchant the world” (Clark 23)? In The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America Dana Philipps points to this risk when she complains that ecocritics frequently put too much faith in the miracles literature can weave (7)� Powers engages the trope� He has his characters voice it, in different registers� Adam explains to his students, “You can’t see what you don’t understand” (Powers, TO 439)� Within the narrative, Patricia mirrors Powers’ own endeavor of writing for a change of perspective� After publishing The Secret Forest, in which she details the social life of trees and their many wondrous abilities, Patricia receives letters from readers who say, “I didn’t realize,” and “I’ve started seeing things,” attesting to her book’s ability to make people “think about life in a different way” (258, emphasis in original)� This is the hopeful outlook for the novel itself� But taking the investigation into grievability seriously, in the awareness that our myths constitute the framing structures that guide what we value and what we would count as loss, also means having a critical look at what we habitually ignore, or have erased from our consciousness� Here, two small moments in the last part of the novel stand out� They caution that grievability is also always a question of how many connections within a network we can meaningfully hold in our minds. The first moment is the short spotlight on the Occupy movement—as a quick flash reminder that social and economic inequalities are deeply entangled with “the contest for the world” and have to be thought within the network as well� The second moment comprises Nick’s encounter—deep in the forest—with a Native American man, who helps Nick build a sculpture out of fallen tree trunks. When Nick expresses his wonder at the tree—“It amazes me how much they say, when you let them� They’re not that hard to hear”—the man answers, “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492” (Powers, TO 493)� What stands out to me here is not some idea that Native tribes have all the answers because they are in some essentialist way closer to nature, but this brief exchange provides a reminder that the history of human interaction with America’s 16 is deeply entangled with re-definitions of nature and specific narratives that expose grievability as generally highly selective� The Overstory thus takes on two projects: its narrative constructs grievable nature via network aesthetics that fuel a sense of wonder at what life can do, but it also draws attention to grievability as a product of specific mechanisms playing on prominent values (and myths) of a given society� Ultimately, the novel does not provide a ready-made answer to the question of what narrative may do in the age of the Anthropocene, or 16 In Dispossessing the Wilderness (1999) Mark David Spence details, for example, how native tribes using land that became dedicated as national parkland were first defined as part of nature and later removed as “enemies” of nature� 204 l inda m. h ess what humans may do� Similar to Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic, 17 A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community� It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (224-225), the question of what the “right” things are is passed on to the readers, or possibly the “learners”—maybe because “a good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch” (Powers, TO 3, emphasis in original)� Works Cited Bieger, Laura� “‘I Am No One’: Self-Narration Between Continuity and Disorder in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers. 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