Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes and the Archive in Richard Powers' The Overstory

Richard Powers’ The Overstory ideally goes back to the writer’s first novel Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985) and to August Sander’s photograph bearing the same title (1914). This is a portrait of three young men standing behind each other in a dandyish upright posture, wearing fancy suits and proudly looking into the camera, happy to go to their dance but completely oblivious that a second funereal dance is awaiting them: the Second World War and––very plausibly––death. The German photographer included this very popular shot in a massive and incomplete project called People of the Twentieth Century, an immense archive showing a pictorial survey of the German society’s class structure during the Weimer Republic. The Overstory is a very similar project. If we substitute Sander’s human types with tree types, physiognomic analysis with phytobiography, human time with tree-time, we might start to grasp the objective and scope of Powers’s last novel: an immense epic on time, imperiled biomes and human and nonhuman multiple entanglements. The overstory of the title, in fact, refers to both the trees’ perspective and to the time frame adopted in the story: almost four billions of years, where humans––in their transient appearance––have been somehow interrelated with trees and plants. Because of this scope, The Overstory has rightfully been considered an example of the Great American Novel: more than 500 pages of distilled erudition that slowly builds up a book “obsessed with the erotics of knowledge” to use Richard Powers’ words. But also, as I will try to demonstrate, with the idea of the urgency to imitate August Sander’s venture, to start a process of visualization and documentation of trees, an archival project that draws on history, truth, memory, empathy and is dictated by the peril of death, by the threat of extinction. Similarly to Sander’s portfolio of “archetypes,” Richard Powers’ nine characters portrayed in the book may be seen as human archetypes of the Anthropocene––each of them paired to a matching arboreal companion––and thus attesting to the inventorial agenda of this project. One in particular, Nicholas Hoel, an environmental artist who corresponds to the American chestnut that survives the decimating blight on the family’s Iowa farm, is the last to inherit a long standing tradition started by his great-great-grandfather one hundred years earlier: to take a photo of the tree the same day in March. And yet, as Richard Powers writes: “The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame.” The Overstory is finally a novel about time and time recording, which is a ceaseless and paradoxical activity for trees as they tell the time when they stop living: their concentric bands are another way of indexing, another catalogue of seasons and experience, another way to photograph and elude death: “Dendrochronology—the science of studying time by way of trees—is a postmortem practice encircled by beginnings and endings” (Murphy 2018).