What Sort of Character is a Forest?
What Sort of Character is a Forest?
Climate literature and old gods
A forest is impossible without trees, but a forest is always more than the trees that create its canopy. A forest is also the moss carpet, the rotting leaves, the shifting world of insect forms, the bird song, the flash of a squirrel’s tail, the drop in temperature as you pass into the atmosphere of a new world. Is a tree that grows all alone trying, somehow, to forest? Or is a forest something that can only appear in a certain arboreal density?
I’m interested in how an ecologist might answer these questions. But I’ll admit, I’m a little more interested in how a poet, or a storyteller, might answer them. It’s not that I don’t want to understand the biological signs and symbols of a forest. I do. But I also want to know how others might describe the feeling of becoming wrapped up in the world of a forest, what sensory signals we experience when a world begins to forest. I want to remember, and explore, who the forests are for us, how their strange powers shape our feelings and our lives.
I recently finished reading Daniel Mason’s The North Woods, which is typically described as a novel about American history, told through one particular house at the edge of the North Woods. And it is that—a story about a house, and about human history. But I also found it to be, as the title promised, a story about the the woods and the forest.
It was a novel that had me returning to another book that we could describe as a tree-centered work of climate fiction: Richard Powers’ The Overstory. These books, I realized, had made me start to wonder who the forest is when it becomes not a place, but perhaps instead a character in a story. As a more than human figure, with the power to give shape and structure to generations of human lives, I think the forest looks a lot like one of the old gods.
The North Woods
The plot of The North Woods is filled with human characters from various points in American history (post-colonization). For the most part, the characters from different eras don’t interact with one another. But the house, and the woods it inhabits, weaves their lives together for us—the readers—in both predictable and unexpected ways.
The human characters in the novel, for the most part, take the woods somewhat for granted. It’s a place to hide, a place to explore, a place to avoid. But they only barely reflect on the stage for their fleeting scenes of action. The woods are like a simple setting, in that sense. They remain a more familiar narrative device.
As the novel unfolds, however, the woods become much more than that for the reader. It’s the woods that sits at the center of the narrative, it’s the woods that holds everyone and everything in the story together. But the woods does more than hold or contain them. The woods create encounters in a deeper form of time, they offer refuge and nurture, they generate fear, they exhibit a kind of power over life and death.
Each of the little short stories in the novel offer us glimpses into the fragile and fleeting ambitions of people. They each have dreams that are mauled and distorted by a social world that seems to exist only to eat them up and spit them back out. But it’s the woods that offers us a glimpse into the deeper, more life-sustaining intimacies from which the human characters draw a more profound sense of power and strength. The woods don’t offer the human characters redemption. But woods act as a power beyond human life and death—one that sustains humans, strangely, in time and space.
There’s the set of spinster sisters (twins), for instance, who grow old together in their house in the woods. Until one of them, in a fit of rage, kills the other. But this isn’t the end of their story. The woods, below an empty space in the old house, holds their bodies together to be uncovered again by the future.
Like these sisters, the human characters in The North Woods are always dying, and decomposing. This is how their stories fold into one another. It’s these acts of death and decomposition that allow the characters to interact across time and space. The woods is what holds them, what connects them, and what makes the story possible in the first place. It sits at the heart of the story and it makes the story happen.
The Underworld Powers of a Forest
When I started to write and think about underworlds, I wasn’t necessarily expecting to think about trees and forests. I was expecting to think about rocky spaces, or even watery spaces. But I wasn’t expecting to learn that forests have often been considered a portal to the underworld—a liminal zone where life and death intersect, or give way to one another. So I’ve been surprised by how often forests lead me to underworlds, and The North Woods was no exception. In the end, the woods in this novel arguably become an underworld space—a zone where the dead are still at work, just at the edge of life. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me. A forest, like an underworld, is a zone that mysteriously confounds and exceeds our understanding of life and death.
The North Woods and The Understory are both new books, and both seem animated primarily by pressing new questions about what’s happening to trees and forests all over our planet. In response to a world that is actively destroying old growth forests, these novels—climate fictions, perhaps, in that they are responding to the devastating events caused by deforestation and climate change—focus our attention on forests and trees. These books make trees the organizing principle. In that sense, these books offer us the possibility of thinking about forests as central and active characters. Not as a passive setting, but as characters who take part in the action and give shape to it. This feels like something needed, and something new.
But to think about these forest stories as climate literature would almost suggest that these forest descriptions are something entirely new—a new genre convention that’s never been attempted. In a novel, this might be true. But I think there are much older stories about forests that understand them as characters, of a sort.
What strikes me about the forest, especially in The North Woods, is how much it resembles (or rhymes with) figures of myth that are more than simple features of the natural world, but are also deities of one sort or another. That is to say, the woods, as a power greater than life and death (at least as we see life and death from a human perspective), appears in the guise of a kind of deity—something like one of the old gods, perhaps.
By the old gods, I simply mean deities from a time before the world of deities was colonized by God—the deity who exists in singular form, and demands singular devotion. Deities who personify the powers of a forest are so numerous, across cultures, I’m not going to list them here. Let’s just think of them, for now, as a kind of ancient forest pantheon. It’s not uncommon for people today to read stories about these old gods as even more misguided and misinformed than monotheistic theology. Even more offensive to many modern sensibilities than the idea that some singular form of deity exists is the idea that deities might be somehow conflated with a material dimension of the world we inhabit.
But I read theology as, more than anything else, a set of conversations about more than human power (and how we relate to it). And the way that I understand many divine figures that are said to reside in the natural world, in some shape or some form, is as a kind of character description of a more than human power that we can relate to but can’t quite understand.
Deities and spirits always have less shape and form, and much more endemic mystery, than a human character. Forests have long been personified as, or understood to be protected by, deities and spirits of many sorts. To think of them in this way is to think of them as figures of a sort, as characters, as personalities with preferences and desires. It’s a way to lightly personify them, without reducing them to human form.
I think that this sort of characterization—of forest spaces as something like an old god—can give us, in some subtle way, a form of interaction with unsettling dimensions of a forest that aren’t easy to reconcile ourselves with. Like the figures of Erebos and Nyx, who emerge in Hesiod’s Theogony in order to give some loose and only just barely intelligible shape to what’s emerging out of chaos, the forest as a character offers us a way to give some small (only barely discernible) shape to a form of mystery, without reducing it to something fully understood.
If novels have helped us to see anything, perhaps it’s that a good character always remains something mysterious: a whole social, emotional, psychological, intellectual, spiritual world that we are only given flickering access to. A good character, in a good novel, will always escape our full comprehension. And maybe this is part of what makes us love them.