Metaphor, Metonymy, Monster, and Tree

Trees may be used metaphorically in speculative fiction. Hollywood versions of indigenous culture, such as Pocahontas (1995) and the Avatar films (2009, 2022), present the tree as an ancestor, part of the community, but an ancestor whose sole purpose is to aid its descendants. A family of humans and cedar trees that resists imperialism in Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990) serves as a metonymy for the dominant culture’s treatment of Native Americans and for its treatment of natural resources. In Patrick Ness’s juvenile novel A Monster Calls (2011), a yew helps the child protagonist process his fear and grief at his mother’s terminal illness, saving Conor from despair. In the medieval “Dream of the Rood,” the tree represents the cross and the crucified Christ. Yet metaphor need not prevent the tree from also being a tree (one which endures the violence of nature and of humans), or from also being a cultural construction—a monster according to the monster theory of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. All four identities (metaphor, metonymy, tree, monster) can occur simultaneously, as Ness’s book and the film based on it confirm. Even as metaphors or metonymies, trees resist definitive categorization, embracing the “and/or” of the monster. The trees in both Ness’s novel and “Dream of the Rood” are physical trees, life rooted in decay. Both stories suggest deep and indissoluble connections between a tree and an individual human being, between more-than-human nature and humanity. Moreover, in both the ancient and the modern stories, the bodies of trees and humans temporarily merge in hybridity, undermining the idea of a boundary between the natural and the human.