Indistinction: (Where) Is the Boundary?

The role of monstrous hybrids who speak for the forests (such as Tolkien’s Ents) is complicated by the agency of the forests themselves, an agency which suggests that not only the tree-guardians but also the trees themselves reside on the border between human and vegetal. In Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, Orson Scott Card presents an even more complex relationship, with the tree as the adult form of a race of sentient mammals. In George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, human flesh and the rooted flesh of trees combine. The overriding questions in such fiction are whether trees, individually or in community, have autonomy and sentience, and where the boundary lies between animal and vegetal. The undermining of boundaries, the deliberate hybridity of the monster, can lead to the ethical approach of indistinction, in which we reject absolute boundaries, and learn to accept and appreciate the Other.