THE OTHERNESS OF TREES: FACTNESS AND FICTION IN RECENT NARRATIVES OF ARBOREAL SURVIVAL

Abstract

The primary intention of this article is to explore some of the ways in which present-day readers, living in an age of increasing awareness of ecological change, interact with the concept of the “tree” as it appears in a variety of discourses: children’s fiction, TV documentary, scholarly writing, popularising ecological discourse, and recent mainstream Anglophone fiction, most notably that of the Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak, whose The Island of Missing Trees (2021) features a sentient tree as a prominent narrator. The primary concern of this article is then to discuss some of the ways in which fictional texts have been augmented by popularising, fact-based discourses, most notably by the use of anthropomorphism, which supposedly permits the reader to “imagine” the existence of the arboreal Other. Inevitably, given the range of discursive sources, the findings are in part conflictual, although all can be seen to contribute in different ways to the current human-centred re-imagination of the perceived fraught relationship that exists between the natural world and the human being.