‘Mycorrhizal multiplicities’ : mapping collective agency in Richard Powers’s The Overstory

This chapter explores how the human-botanical entanglements of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory (2018) encourage us to rethink agency as dispersed, connected, and multiple. Prompted by Eugene Thacker’s question “how is anything accomplished” in a “distributed organization?” (Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part Two). CTheory. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14541/5388, 2004, n.p.), I explore the strategies Powers uses to represent the emergence and organisation of human and nonhuman collectives. Through polyvocal narration, a breakdown in chapter demarcation, and the patterned repetition of phrases, ideas, and textual references, The Overstory subtly weaves together the lives of its human characters. Using recent scientific work on plant communication, I analogically map these human connections onto the vegetal agency of trees, which use ‘silent’ and ‘invisible’ chemical signals and fungal, or mycelial, networks to communicate information. Reading for patterns within the novel, I argue that repetitions containing the plant affects of ‘collectivity’ and ‘metamorphosis’ operate as textual equivalents to the chemical signals of plants, weaving together human and vegetal worlds. By following The Overstory’s analogical threads, it is possible to argue that Powers’s novel evokes a non-singular and non-anthropocentric form of agency, a multispecies and ‘mycorrhizal’ multiplicity.This chapter explores how the human-botanical entanglements of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory (2018) encourage us to rethink agency as dispersed, connected, and multiple. Prompted by Eugene Thacker’s question “how is anything accomplished” in a “distributed organization?” (Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part Two). CTheory. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14541/5388, 2004, n.p.), I explore the strategies Powers uses to represent the emergence and organisation of human and nonhuman collectives. Through polyvocal narration, a breakdown in chapter demarcation, and the patterned repetition of phrases, ideas, and textual references, The Overstory subtly weaves together the lives of its human characters. Using recent scientific work on plant communication, I analogically map these human connections onto the vegetal agency of trees, which use ‘silent’ and ‘invisible’ chemical signals and fungal, or mycelial, networks to communicate information. Reading for patterns within the novel, I argue that repetitions containing the plant affects of ‘collectivity’ and ‘metamorphosis’ operate as textual equivalents to the chemical signals of plants, weaving together human and vegetal worlds. By following The Overstory’s analogical threads, it is possible to argue that Powers’s novel evokes a non-singular and non-anthropocentric form of agency, a multispecies and ‘mycorrhizal’ multiplicity.B