Trees of Our Times: Representing Arboreal Temporalities in Ali Smith’s Autumn and Richard Powers’ The Overstory

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of tree time and how it is represented in Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018). It argues that trees’ relationship to time is different from humans’ and sensibility towards their temporal otherness is necessary if we are to enter into responsible relationships with trees, as well as the non-human world. Both Autumn and The Overstory facilitate such ecological awareness by staging human-tree encounters where the alterity of tree time is foregrounded. While Smith engages with tree time in its cyclical form, highlighting its heteronomy, Powers provides a good example of how the challenges of representing the linear, longue durée temporality of trees can be overcome. In both novels, the authors’ engagement with tree time and its alterity gives rise to ideologically challenging gestures at long-held ideas of human- nature relationships. The Overstory unsettles anthropocentric understandings of time. Meanwhile, the cyclical form of arboreal temporality represented in Autumn evokes a pre-modern, pre- capitalist conception of time, which works to reveal the entanglements between the natural world and mankind.