Tweesak/PexelsAmerican psychologist Abraham Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs theory, first proposed in 1943, positions self-actualisation at the apex of human motivation and flourishing. According to Maslow, it is only after an individual’s basic physiological needs are met – along with the need for safety, love and esteem – that they can go on to achieve their fullest human potential, finding meaning and purpose in their lives. “What a man can be, he must be,” Maslow states, on his way to explaining that the specific shape this self-actualisation takes will “vary greatly from person to person”.What’s less well-known is that a year before his death in 1970, the revered psychologist revised his theory, creating an even higher stratum of motivation, which he reserved for self-transcendence. This refers to “transcendence of the selfish Self” and “implies a wider circle of identifications, i.e., with more people approaching the limit of identification with all human beings”.Review: Arborescence – Rhett Davis (Hachette)Rhett Davis’s latest novel Arborescence offers up a sort Maslovian dreamscape of transcendental potential.The novel is set in a not-too-distant future where people are being used as avatars by self-actualising, deadpan artificial intelligences. With humanity going to hell in a handbasket, the possibility of escaping one’s ego and body begins to look more and more appealing to more and more people. What starts off with the odd green shoot here and there quickly grows into a fully-fledged forest, as people start literally turning into trees. Or, as the protagonist’s biosocial anthropologist partner puts it: “I think what it means to be human might be changing.” Rhett Davis. Hachette Arborescence is a thematically and aesthetically consistent successor to Davis’s 2022 debut Hovering, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for an unpublished manuscript and went on to be shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The postmodern sway over that subtly surreal earlier novel continues in Arborescence, with nods to the likes of Don DeLillo, John Barth, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. The ethical imperative and turn toward sincerity typical of post-postmodernism (sometimes called “new sincerity”) also finds its way into the story via the guidance of American satirist George Saunders, whom Davis cited as an influence in an interview shortly after the publication of his first novel. In fact, this appraisal of Saunders’ method from 2006 transposes uncannily onto Davis’s oeuvre: A Saunders story typically operates by some gross exaggeration of contemporary life, set in a not-too-distant future where things have gone irrevocably haywire. His admixture of comedy and pathos, absurdity and realism, and his playful touch make it so you barely feel the political sting. But it’s there.Detached forebodingWhen Arborescence begins, its protagonist Bren and his partner Caelyn are struggling to find any real meaning in the world. Bren works for an e-commerce site called Queue: a Temu-inspired company with an Orwellian “telescreen” interface. Caelyn whiles her time away in a garden centre on the highway just outside the city – that is, until she gets fired for stealing/rescuing pot plants. Early set-piece conversation topics are superficial and quotidian: house insurance, towels, missing keys. The dialogue is rife with non sequiturs and a sort of detached foreboding reminiscent of DeLillo’s White Noise:“I was late for my glass-blowing class again. Do you know if Travis has house insurance, love?”“We rarely find time to talk about insurance these days,” I say.“Tch. I was just asking.”“Ask him!”“He doesn’t answer my questions,” she says.“Well, I guess we’ll never know.”“At least until his house burns down. Then we’ll know.”In the middle of the restless, artificially luminescent night, things start to get interesting. Lying in bed doomscrolling, Caelyn comes across a video of people standing around in a field with their eyes closed – waiting, it appears, for something significant to happen. She recognises the location and decides she’ll go and investigate, with the goal of writing an article about this “tree cult”. Her quirky curiosity quickly becomes an obsession and, before long, she has a PhD in psychobiotics and is the world’s leading expert on the phenomenon she dubs “arborescing”.The strengths of this novel are chiefly intellectual, rather than dramatic. The arresting premise feels ready-made for festival panels, environmentally-conscious book-club discussions, and (thinking of my own selfish, yet-to-be-transcended needs) university syllabi. In a little under 300 pages, Davis addresses, or at least pays deference to, all the big-ticket concerns of our time: artificial intelligence, ecological disaster, societal decay, colonial culpability and overconsumption. He also leaves plenty of space for readers to make up their own minds about what might constitute a positive outcome for a species on the brink of existential annihilation. On this front, Arborescence is a smart, thoughtful and ultimately serious book. Davis pairs his fondness for pastiche with a deeper philosophical interest in questions of sentience and consciousness. “I wonder what it’d be like […] Being a tree”, the protagonist asks, in a play on philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous “what is it like to be a bat?” line of enquiry. And while the novel’s depiction of the absurdities that characterise modern life threaten to overwhelm its loftier concerns, one appreciates the high-minded ambition.In terms of plot and character development, however, Arborescence is a little root-bound. Conditions are favourable and yet it somehow fails to blossom into an affecting story. Apart from the exquisitely rendered climax, I found myself reading with an indifference characteristic of the novel’s protagonist Bren, whose mounting troubles are never so great they can’t be warded off with a good takeaway coffee. While Bren shows the potential for tremendous physical change, he proves less susceptible to the emotional and psychological growth needed to make him memorable. He is more narrator than character, more flat than round, more reactive than active. Somewhat wilted, if you will.One could mount a solid theoretical defence for this rendering: Isn’t technology passivizing all of us? Isn’t narrative desire inherently anthropocentric? Isn’t a “poetry of witness” the “radical” gesture we need in this age of man-made cataclysm? But these are the sort of post-hoc, academically-manufactured arguments that tend to mean very little to readers out there in the real world. Did the character touch me in a way that felt like actual human contact? is the more enduring question. And the answer, in this case, is not quite.The figurative wood-chipperFormally, Davis avoids that overly manicured garden look by putting the narrative through the figurative wood-chipper, splintering the chapters into a rough-hewn assortment of various sizes and pieces. These range from several pages in length to single sentences and amplify the crosstalking technique heavily employed in the dialogue. This deceptively simple landscaping technique is, however, somewhat spoilt by the large deposits of metafictional fertiliser wheelbarrowed into the narrative. These take the form of imaginary texts, which purport to offer a “clever commentary on the artificiality of dramatic structures”, while servicing a flimsy backstory about a missing childhood friend. Italo Calvino. Wikimedia Commons. The primary example here is a comic book turned television series called Voidstar, which reads like a sci-fi version of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It is unclear whether this hypotext owes a debt to Zachary Mason’s science-fiction novel Void Star (two words) or whether it’s just a nomenclatural coincidence (I suspect the latter). But rather than promoting growth, its presence overpowers all living things with its thick ammonic scent.Where the novel succeeds is in the mythic register. Examples of “arborescence” are found in countless folktales, from Indigenous Dreaming Stories through to Hellenic accounts of transmutation. Of bodies into novel shapes transformedMy Muse the tale designs.Thus the Roman poet Ovid begins Book One of his Metamorphoses, in which the nymph Daphne escapes an infatuated Apollo by changing into a laurel tree. In that tale, nature counteracts the god’s ravenous all-too-human desires through sublime intervention – extremely and literally overwhelming the senses with its awe-inspiring countenance. A similar goal sat at the heart of the reactionary 18th century Romantic movement, whose poets and artists drew from ancient myths and invoked formidable scenes of nature in the face of an all-consuming industrial age. The allusion to myth and the fantastical evolutionary leaps of faith in Arborescence might likewise be viewed as a sublime Romantic gesture fit for our age of quantum uncertainty. Apollo and Daphne – Piero del Pollaiuolo (c.1470) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons In his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell locates the experiential frame of reference for all human beings in an “undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (Participation), which is all alive (Animism), and which was created by a superior being (Artificialism)”.“No small wonder then,” writes Campbell, “that the above Three Principles are precisely those most represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.”Arborescence sits closer to the animistic end of this continuum than the religious. Somehow reminiscent of the simulated animal calls found in Peter Sculthorpe’s music and the tortured and distorted figures rising out of the landscape in Arthur Boyd’s Nebuchadnezzar paintings, Davis’s representations tap into hybrid kinships that precede stuffy Enlightened conceptions of culture and spirituality. They are terrifying and bewitching at the same time.Davis attempts to account for this beguiling manoeuvre when, masquerading as Bren, he performs the following metafictional intrusion: I’m starting to think it’s the same story, over and over. We’ve been copying the ancient Greeks for thousands of years, while ignoring the ancient storytellers of our own land. Introduction, inciting incident, rising action […] Over and over […] As if it’s the only way we want to understand the world, as if we can’t submit to its chaos.To my mind, this makes for a somewhat reductive analysis of what is actually far more interesting and impressive literary feat. Australian playwright Timothy Daly comes closer to accounting for the achievement when he reminds budding dramatists that The most amazing scenes in Shakespeare are precisely those which are least “realistic”: the ghost scenes, or the mad, bedlamic scenes, where bestial impulses, paranormal phenomena, bizarre miracles and freakish feats of nature are unleashed on the awe-struck human witnesses.Like that copycat William Shakespeare, Davis is at his most amazing, not when he is decrying narrative structure, but when he is wielding it like a talisman against the encroaching chaos of a looming inhuman future.Luke Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.