Dead Tree, Living Figure; or, the Contemporary Prometheus

We cannot see the forest for the trees. It is no mistake that one of the most common English expressions featuring trees is about myopia. So invested in seeing trees as familiar figures, we ignore the ways in which they are foreign to us and thus what we might learn from them. As a result, we also cannot see other plant species for the trees. Instead, we characterize trees as the most human of plants. While other plants vine or spread rhizomatically, trees stand upright, with branching arms reaching out and rooty legs tucked into the ground. Their torsos, or trunks, in the case of young trees or those smaller species, are thin enough that a human can wrap their arms around them in an interspecies embrace (whence the term “tree hugger”). Some trees are even given personal names, like Old Survivor, Major Oak, Gran Abuelo, and Tāne Mahuta.

Where I grew up, it was common to place a ceramic face—eyes, nose, and mouth—on tree trunks, thus disfiguring the tree in the process of giving it a facial figure. We even speak of family trees, and so the tree structures human genealogy. Our relation to trees is thus one of profound anthropomorphism, by which we see in trees what we see in ourselves. Trees might even be the example par excellence of anthropomorphism. In fact, one of the most widely read essays on the term, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” by Paul de Man, posthumously published in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), concerns the anthropomorphism of trees. I read such anthropomorphism as a disfiguring process; by making their form human, we sever trees from the kingdom Plantae. If we understood trees not as “human plants” but as representatives of their kingdom, what might we learn? Trying to see what is lost by our anthropomorphic vision of trees requires thinking back through the structure of anthropomorphism itself, starting with de Man’s essay.