A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud

Carson McCullers was a Southerner, born in Georgia in 1917. She

died in New York in 1967.
Her main literary output consists in
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)
The Member of the Wedding (1646)
The Ballad of the Sad Caf (1951)
Clock without Hands (1961)
This particular story could be described as a moment of truth set
against the dreariness of an ordinary day, a flash of intuition issuing from
darkness and soon returning to it.
What kind of a short story is it?
Like almost all short stories, it has a title designing it as a verbal
construction, a mental universe.
This title extracts from the story three objects symbolising the earth,
the sky and life. The tree, born from the earth and growing upward towards
the sky, links the two elements, otherwise unconnected. The order of the
words is significant: the tree comes first and is followed by the rock
suggesting sterility then the cloud implying dissolution in the boundless
cosmos.
It is a 3rd person story written in the past historic. The narrator is
outside the story, apparently letting facts and events unfold by themselves
without any intrusion. However, the study of the first paragraph is enough
to reveal that on the contrary he is everywhere present, both intruding into
the narrative and loading most sentences with emotional impact.
Omniscient as he is, he is the eye which sees everything, selects what is
important for the reader to know and the voice recounting events and
indirectly commenting on them.
Two short sentences from the 1rst paragraph suffice to illustrate this
point:

 It was raining that morning and still very dark: importance of the
demonstrative pronoun (that) which sets a distance between the event and
the reader by its derogatory connotation. The adverb 'still' introduces a
comment: it is darker than usual, maybe owing to the rain, who knows, but
whatever the cause, its main function is to inject an element of restlessness
and anxiety into the narrative.
After the raw, empty street, the caf seemed friendly and bright: the
adjectives ''raw'' and ''empty'' are set in contrast with ''friendly'' and
''bright'', implying (the boy's impressions) that the inside is a welcoming as
the outside is hostile. However, the use of ''seemed'' (the narrator's
intrusion) introduces an element of doubt. The brightness and the
friendliness might only be apparent, which is confirmed by the end of the
paragraph: Leo, the owner of the place, is described as ''bitter and stingy'',
and none of the men are talking.
''Seemed'', ''that'' and ''still'' all are linked to convey the impression
that it is an unusal and particularly disquieting morning.
The story has neither structure nor plot. Nothing happens, except for
the old man's story. The situation at the end is very similar to that at the
beginning. The only difference is that many characters have left and that
the two main protagonists, the old man and the young boy, have vanished
in the night. The little that takes place happens in the old man's mind, to
which the reader has no access. All in all, after a brief introduction setting
the scene, the story is limited to the old man's monologue, here and there
interrupted by the boy's questions, meant to renew the impetus of the flow
of words, and by Leo's coarse and brutal interjections, so many intrusions
of reality into the illusory dream of the speaker.
Although the story has neither climax, nor crisis, nor even a proper
denouement, Leo's interruptions landmark the successive narrative phases.

1)
creation of an atmosphere and first contact between the old man
and the boy,
2)
story of the broken marriage,
3)
the strange experience that followed, the mock awakening of a
spirit of wonder,
4)
exposition of the science of love.

The end of the story focusses on the young boy as it did at the
beginning: the circle is complete and by this epanaleptic process one is
back to square one, as though nothing had happened.
The physical and social environment
Both are linked, since the narrator has made it clear that there is no
difference beween the outside world and the microcosm of the streetcar
caf. Outside, it is dark, wet and empty; inside, it is silent and with only
two soldiers, three spinners and a man buried in his beer mug. All the
customers are briefly presented as freaks of nature, As for the owner, his
name is Leo, i.e. 'lion', but of the feline, he only possesses the cat-like
spring when he interrupts the old man and bawls out coarse remarks.
Actually, at one point in the narrative, he is even made to miaow.
Moreover, right from the start, he is described as stingy, grim and sarcastic.
Whatever may happen, he will stay outside, a down-to-earth fellow
running his business and doing it rather well (he refuses to serve beer to
the boy 'who's only a minor'). For him, whatever happens is crazy and he
will stay aloof and vulgar, determined to have nothing to do with such
trash.
The men in the caf are bent over their food or their drinks like
animals. Nobody moves. The old man is hunched over the counter. All
seem frozen in hieratic attitudes. Hardly do they lift their heads, then
hurriedly go back to their mugs like automata, or else they leave the place.
The young boy is undersized, with one shoulder higher than the other. As
for the old man, the transient, the wandering Jew, he looks like the
caricature of a clown, with a long nose and a pale complexion, orange hair
and crooked fingers, a wizened, shrivelled up clown who will be allowed
to unfold and open up for brief moment before returning to anonymity.
Moreover, time links the hostile night and the menacing brightness of
the caf: to the clock ticking away the seconds corresponds the imperious
shriek of the siren calling back the workers to the mill, the dehumanised
order prevailing outside, and passively they obey in silence. Finally, in a
symbolic erratic gesture, the soldier wipes off his muddy putties before
leaving, as though the door opened both ways onto the same dreariness (a
technique reminiscent of films by Buster Keaton).

The message of the old man: a story within a story

Set against this background is voiced the old man's message. For crazy
as he may seem, difformed and even frightening, the old man is neither a
maniac or a vicious perverted wreck, but a sort of prophet clad in the
garments of a clown, with a beautiful if pathetic twofold message to
convey, about love and the spirit of wonder as a substitute for love.
The emphasis is laid upon the irrationality of love, neither the privilege
of the young nor the beautiful. The two photographs he shows to the boy
picture either nothing, mere emptiness, the face being blurred, or
something hideous, all that remains to be seen being an enormous tummy.
Yet these photos are held like precious objects in the big grimy palm with
crooked fingers, now tame and protective.
The more the old fellow talks about his love, the brighter and the more
reassuring the atmosphere in the caf becomes. Warmth now radiates from
him who unshrivels, unfolds, becomes animated, even fostering dawn,
since 'the windows in the street car were pale blue with light'. Yet, at the
end of the story, the light of early morning has returned to its usual damp
greyness.
The reason why love appears so reassuring is explained when the old
man says that his wife was 'the assembly line for his soul', connecting
otherwise loose elements, enabling him to gather together his dispersed
personality, restoring his lost identity. Yet, this experience of love proved a
failure. Humourously, the woman was called Dodo, an extinct species of
birds. Like that species, love became extinct and had to be replaced by the
science of love.
The science of love
It is presented as a preliminary stage, but it soon appears as a
substitute, the result of experience, not the spontaneous outcome of
innocence. Because the man has loved, his memory used to provide
constant reminders of his previous passion. Like the madeleine in Proust, a
small piece of glass, a shadow on the wall at night triggered off a chain of
reminiscences. Hence, having been deprived of love, he started to consider

objects and sensations linked to these objects as reminders of his past love.
Thus the process was inverted, his science being a return to his past, but in
an indirect way, since he began to devote his care and his affection to his
present awareness.
The discovery of love has to be gradual, first small things, simple
objects. In a way, this may be viewed as a rediscovery of poetry through a
new spirit of wonder. As in The Little Prince by Saint-Exupry, once we
have learnt to tame things, we begin to be tamed by them. Normally, after
having learnt the art of loving, love should begin to take hold of us. Like
Pascal in the church, asking men to go through the motions of worship in
order to foster faith, a new awareness of the beauty of the world may lead
to a fruitful feeling. Such a science implies a moral lesson concerning the
reponsibility of each person in the experience of love. Love is sacred,
difficult, sometimes dangerous. Once man has loved, he is no longer free,
becoming reponsible not only for himself, but for the thing or the person
he is in love with.
The science of love, however wise it may seem, remains a failure. It is
a science, cautious, measured out, doled and meted out, calculated, without
the wholeness and the spontaneity of passion, thus most unlike the feeling
which the old man experienced at first. Moreover, it is applied to
unreceptive objects, deprived of any emotional capability. The old man has
slowly become able to love anything, except for the one important thing, a
woman. His science, the outcome of disillusion and bitterness, turns out to
be only a wary flower of despair.
The metaphysical solitude of man
The short story is about the impossible communication between
human beings.
The old man yearns for communication, with a tense agitated face,
his eyes bright with impatient urgency, each of his statements ending with
a question underlying his eagerness and his overwhelming need to be
understood. Conversely, the child apparently represents virgin land, young
and unspoiled, in need of affection, ready to learn and to know more.
Yet the message is lost on all concerned. When the men in the caf

hear the word 'love', they laugh, then go back to their mugs. Just as the old
man is about to deliver his message, the soldiers get up and leave. Just as
he is about to explain it, the spinners go. Leo keeps interrupting him at key
points, punctuating his monologue with vulgar intrusions. The young boy
is not interested in the man; in spite of the spell apparently cast over him,
he is bored and even frightened, wondering whether the fellow is drunk or
crazy or both. His final comment 'Sure he's done a lot of travelling' shows
that he cannot make heads or tails of what the old transient had to say.
Thus each individual appears as solitary. There is a barrier separating
human beings who remain walled up in the prison of their own mental
universe. In spite of the silent complicity apparently uniting Leo and his
customers, each in his way, animal-like, is alone, no exchange of thought
or feeling passing from one the other. The old man, who looks seedy and
frail, shrinks back to his usual shrivelled self and returns to the greyness
and the rain, vanishing in the night. Reality has once more triumphed over
the spirit of wonder. Dreariness, hostility, indifference prevail. No further
hope is left. The heart is a lonely hunter for ever doomed to its vain hunt
and its solitude.
Conclusion
The only winner is time (Kronos eating his children), for ever
present, in the time of day, the dawn, the morning, in the clock ticking on
the wall, in the siren of the mill, in the measured out science of the old
man, in the endlessness of the night and the rain.
Time detroys everything and everybody, the soldiers and the spinners
having been changed into thoughtless robots, the old fellow into a
ludicrous ruin of a man. The young boy himself will eventually be
destroyed, he is alrady showing signs of premature decrepitude (his
shoulder for instance).
No hope, no light. Business as usual.