fables without morals

"the tree and the cat" (evgeniy sivokon, 1983)

The Soviet-era cartoon “The Tree and the Cat” tells the story of a proud and self-reliant tree, which has never even bloomed, and a white cat that is tossed out of a carriage and comes to rest underneath it. The cat says it wishes it could be completely self-sufficient and need no one. The tree says it will teach the cat how to live that way. Over the changing seasons, the tree shelters the cat from stormy and snowy weather, eventually even creating a hollow within itself for the cat to crawl inside. In short, the tree falls in love. But when spring comes, the cat leaves. It has learned how to be alone.

After experiencing this short little movie, one irrestible impulse is naturally to compare it to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, which was published in America some twenty years before. As in “The Tree and the Cat,” the tree in The Giving Tree gives of itself to another whose only intention is to take, though in the case of Silverstein’s book the tree’s self-gift runs to the point of self-annihilation. It’s unlikely that these stories are really in conversation with each other, I think, though The Giving Tree did have a Soviet translation by 1983, so it might not be impossible.

Because The Giving Tree is a parable about unconditional (and, quite plainly, motherly) love, it is, to put it lightly, divisive.¹ I am not a fan myself (see footnote), but in any case The Giving Tree is certainly meant to model an ideal of love, albeit an ideal that you are unlikely to achieve in life (or even want to achieve). The tree doesn’t suffer; it’s always happy to have been able to give. It has a lesson about what real love looks like, even if it’s almost impossible to know what that might look like in practice.

The only thing we’re told at the end of “The Tree and the Cat” is that if the cat had never come, the tree would never have had a story. The cat seems cruel for turning out to have stayed true to the terms of its bargain with the tree, but then it never asked the tree for anything, including to be taught how to be alone; the tree offered. It did not show up specifically to ruin this tree’s life (though one wonders after the short film is over exactly what led to its getting thrown out of that carriage).

In any case, even though the ending of the story feels pedagogical, thanks to its narrator’s reflections at the end, there is really no moral on hand. Should the tree have never helped the cat? Was the cat wrong to leave? I think the short is completely uninterested in these questions. The tree helped and the cat left. The tree has bloomed and hollowed itself out and experienced betrayal, but the betrayal may have simply come from its own ability to change for the right object.²

The story is what it is. You can turn it over and over in your hands but you’ll never extract an answer. We are not looking at a story about what love ought or ought not to be, but rather a story about what love sometimes is.

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There’s nothing wrong with a moral, incidentally. There are many of works of art that I’d praise that are without question didactic and intent on passing on moral or political lessons to the reader. (That perennial online favorite classic, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, is such a book, and I’ve read it enough times I actually can’t remember how many anymore.) As Flannery O’Connor says somewhere, art is ultimately a question of what you can get away with.³ That’s my basic critical principle; there are wrong approaches, and failed approaches, but no definitively right ones.

But there is something special to me about a story like this, which is so simple and so compressed in its form, so unambiguous, and yet somehow so transparent as to be totally opaque. Sometimes love is like this. There’s no sense complaining and there’s nothing to learn.

1. My own belief about The Giving Tree is (frankly) just that it’s kind of stupid and glib; I don’t think it’s unhealthy for children to read in some mass sense, as if it will program them to be self-harmingly generous. (I see no signs of this problem on a social level.) To me it’s part of a canon of memorable but annoying children’s books, a canon that also includes The Little Prince and some stories by Oscar Wilde (“The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”). Ultimately, it just lacks what makes Shel Silverstein’s other poems and illustrations so charming, because it’s so deadly earnest and determined to impart a lesson of some kind to its readers.

2. In her book Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar has a description of Charles Bovary as so trusting he was asking to be betrayed, which has always seemed completely wrong to me as both a description of that character and also of people in general, and yet it’s stayed with me for years, go figure:

We can drive people to betray us—and even invite it—by passivity, indifference, blindness, and self-hatred. Moreover, untrustworthy people encourage each other. All of this occurs in one way or another in Madame Bovary. Charles Bovary is not an innocent; he is simply so passive and deliberately blind that he will not see that his wife has lovers. He is no stranger to deceit, however, for when he was a student he spent his parents' money on pleasures, while he made them believe that he was studying medicine. Eventually he settles down, but he betrays his patients, and he is not so obtuse that he could not easily have understood what was happening to his wife or what she was up to. He is too self-centered to recognize her or her growing troubles. Her infidelity to him is in any case a minor betrayal compared to the refusal of her two lovers to help her pay her debts. Within their world, however, they behave just as one might have expected. They are no more than conventional, and it is she who alone has misperceived the entire reality. What could be hoped for there? She has spent not just more money, but far more trust than she could afford, given this economy. It is as if betrayal were a way of life rather than an assault upon a victim; that is why self-destruction is Madame Bovary's only possible exit. Betrayal is built into any relationship where trust is placed in an imagined person, not an actual one. But who would not try to fantasize her way out of a situation as mean and dull as Emma Bovary's?

3. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”: “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”