Abstract: Since its publication, Richard Powers’s The Overstory has attracted considerable attention for its environmentalism and its attention to multispecies life. The novel also exhibits a focus on the potential power of storytelling as a means of changing thought. With this focus of The Overstory in mind, this paper utilizes Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene, which is characterized by multispecies entanglement, a decentering of humanity, and embracing the present in order to examine the contours of The Overstory’s environmentalist storytelling. Reading The Overstory through Haraway’s concept reveals its complications. On the one hand, the novel is aligned with the Chthulucene in its portrayal of collectivity, its decentering of humanity, and its refusal of defeatism. On the other hand, the novel displays a disposition that combines pessimism toward the present and optimism concerning the far future, which adds a degree of complexity to the novel’s apparent Chthulucene-aligned story. This disposition reveals the concurrent presence of Anthropocene-inflected thinking that subtly exists within the novel, even as it largely can be read as the kind of narrative that Haraway envisions.
Deep into the sprawling, decade-spanning narrative of Richard Powers’s 2017 novel The Overstory, psychology PhD student Adam Appich finds himself changed after meeting tree-sitting environmental activists Olivia Vandergriff and Nick Hoel during his field research (328-32). When he later joins them at an environmentalist resistance community (333-35), engineer-turned-activist Mimi Ma asks him how to persuade people to get on board with ecological causes (336). Adam responds by stating that “[t]he best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story” (336). Adam’s statement is just one of many occurrences where The Overstory references the transformative power of storytelling (380, 394, 421-22, 488), indicating how the novel “foregrounds the central role stories play in shaping the way we inhabit the world” (Grener 57). The repeated manner in which The Overstory emphasizes the potential of stories illuminates a key tenet of the novel: its self-reflexive aim to become a story with thought-changing potential, an aim that is interconnected with the novel’s thorough environmentalist commitment.