A rock, a tree, a cloud

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Student photo project of the Carmichael Library in collaboration with the Art Faculty of the University of Montevallo, Alabama, as a visual reception of Carson McCullers' short story A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud in January 2011

A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud (German: A tree, a rock, a cloud , translated by Elisabeth Schnack ) is a short story by the American writer Carson McCullers , written in 1941 after her first stroke and first published in Harper's Bazaar in November 1942 has been. The story was then in the collection in 1951 The Ballad of the Sad Café (dt. The Ballad of the Sad Café , translated by Elisabeth Schnack, 1961) was added and since then in various anthologies published.

In A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud Carson McCullers thematizes in a brief, exemplary condensed form the life lie of a lonely old man dressed in the guise of a "science of love", who has the failure of the love relationship of his life with a nihilistic , destructive life. and tries to justify love philosophy retrospectively to a boy he does not know. However, the boy who is still on the threshold of childhood is unable to understand him in any way; the old man's endeavors to understand or communicate remain one-sidedly monological and are doomed to failure from the start.

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In rainy weather, the story takes place early in the morning shortly before dawn in Leo's café, which is open all night. A 12-year-old newsboy, who remains anonymous, goes to Leo's café for a cup of coffee before delivering the newspapers. At this point there are only a few silent guests in the café; In addition to a few soldiers, three workers from a nearby cotton mill found refuge here before starting their early shift. In addition, there is an elderly man in the café drinking his beer alone at a table.

The bad-tempered café owner pays the boy little attention; as he is about to leave the café, the older man calls him over to his table. Suddenly he then explains to the surprised boy that he loves him ( The man said slowly: 'I love you' , p. 148). Although the other guests laugh about it, the man is very serious. The boy is confused and unsure, but then sits down next to the old man. He takes two faded photos of a woman out of his hip pocket and asks the boy to look carefully at them.

Then he explains to the boy that the woman in the photos is his ex-wife and sadly begins to tell his story. At the age of 51, he married the then thirty-year-old woman, whom he had loved very much and whom he had assumed that she also loved, just three days after they had met twelve years earlier.

After "one year, nine months, three days and two nights" (p. 150), of course, she left him to start a new life with another man. Although she had all the comforts and luxuries at home, as he later realized, she was dissatisfied.

The woman meant everything to him, she was something like an assembly line for his soul (“something like an assembly line for my soul”, p. 151). After she left him, he traveled the country for two years and did everything possible to find her again. In the third year after the separation, something extremely strange happened. After initially having only one thought, as in the madness (“kind of mania”, p. 152 f.), To win her back, he could no longer evoke her image in his memory. Whenever he lay down on his bed and tried to think about her, his memories and thoughts seemed to be obliterated (“my mind became a blank”, p. 153).

However, any external objects or appearances, such as e.g. For example, a piece of glass on the sidewalk, a coin in a jukebox or a shadow on the wall at night, involuntarily recalled the memory of them; henceforth he no longer combed the country for her, but instead she just followed him in “his soul” (“she began to chase me around in my very soul”, p. 153).

In this terrible phase of his life he had become terminally ill (“sick mortal”, p. 153), had started “to drink, whore around and commit every sin that suddenly irritated him” (“I boozed, I fornicated, I committed any sin that suddenly appealed to me ”, p. 153).

In the fifth year after the loss of his wife he began to meditate on love and to fathom it (“I meditated on love and reasoned it out”, p. 154). This is how he developed his “science of love” ( I am talking about love. With me it is a science , pp. 150 and 154), which gives him peace and quiet (“peace”, p. 154) have. Without this science it is extremely dangerous for a man ("most dangerous", p. 155) to fall in love with a woman first, as this means beginning at the wrong end of love ("They fall in love with a woman . [...] They start at the wrong end of love ", p. 155).

For a man, love should instead begin, as he confides in the boy in a whisper, with “a tree, a rock and a cloud” ( 'Son, do you know how love should be begun?' [...] 'A tree . A rock. A cloud. ' , P. 155).

At the time when he developed this science of love after his meditation, he was very careful. He bought a goldfish, focused on that goldfish and loved it. Then he progressed from one thing to the next and developed his technique day by day so that he now masters it masterfully (p. 155 f.). He could now love anything, everything and everyone ("I can love anything. Everything, son. And anybody.", P. 156).

When the boy asked shyly, reflecting his incomprehension, whether he had ever found his wife again or had ever loved her again, the old man simply replied that this was “the last step in his science” and that he was not quite ready for it (“ You see that is the last step in my science. And I am not quite ready yet. ", P. 156).

With a radiant smile (“bright smile”, p. 156), the old man leaves the café, complacent, not without repeating that he loves the boy.

The 12-year-old is insecure for a long time and then asks the café owner whether the old man is drunk or a drug addict, which Leo briefly denies. He leaves the boy's subsequent question, whether the man is crazy, unanswered. The boy then leaves the café confused and uncomprehending, with the final remark: He [the old man] has certainly traveled a lot (“He sure has done a lot of traveling.”, P. 157).

Interpretative approach

In contrast to the “rough, empty” street outside (“the raw, empty street”, p. 147), the authorial narrator describes the café as the setting for the framework plot of A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud as “friendly and bright” (“Friendly and bright”, p. 147) and represents a calming, hopeful place of refuge in an inhospitable, dreary environment. The soldiers as well as the workers from the cotton mill refer to as well as the factory siren that announces the morning shift an artificially or artistically ordered world of barracks and cafés; the cotton mill as well as the route of the old man's migration point additionally to the southern geographic background of the author.

The figure of the adolescent newspaper boy on the threshold from childhood to adulthood points beyond the purely atmospheric design to the actual, central theme of Carson McCullers: the confusion and helplessness of initiation in the sudden confrontation with the "science of love" of the "Transit" old man. The frame-like conversation of the two introductory and concluding remarks "I love you" expresses his understanding of love as a one-sided, purely platonic relationship from which only the selfish lover can benefit, and at the same time thematically repeats the views and doctrine the author who expresses herself equally in her other literary works.

As in The Ballad of the Sad Café , A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud also emphasizes the interchangeability of the object of such selfish love. Such love is not tied to a specific person or any particular object, it can also relate to a dead or fundamentally impossible object. The old man emphatically declares that he can love anything or everyone, be it a goldfish, a bird or a stranger on the road (p. 156) or even, as the title line of the story says, “a Tree, a rock, a cloud ”(p. 155). According to the old man, the love developed with scientific technology begins here, as it were, as if in a construction kit.

In response to a question from the boy, however, the old man hesitantly and embarrassedly describes a woman as the last step in his science (“last step in my science”, p. 156), for which he is not yet ready. He explains the failure of his love affair with his former wife, who has left him, by saying that he was wrong with the wrong end of love ("the wrong end of love", p. 155). H. the climax, started. His technique or theory of the “correct” flow of love shows up only as a rationalization or suppression of his frustrating experience of an unfulfilled love; the former lover is vaguely placed at the end of an " imaginary ladder" so that he can initially be satisfied with less.

The symbolic title , which refers to transcendentalist models, also makes McCuller's view of the transience of love ("prominent transient" -ness, p. 149) clear, as it is underlined by Leo's brief comment and the more extensive statement of the old man who says about himself : "I graduated from one thing to another [...] And now I am a master" (p. 155 f.).

In addition, in the other messages of the old man, the incidental and interchangeability of the partner or the object of his love is accentuated and the purely functional role of this one-sided love, which is only useful to the selfish lover. His following statement symbolizes the mere functionality of such a love again with the technically cold, (pseudo) scientifically rational metaphor of the “assembly line for the soul” (“something like an assembly line for my soul”, p. 151). However, unlike in The Ballad of the Sad Café , Carson McCullers does not express her nihilistic view of love in A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud with ultimate consequence: the behavior of the woman who has left the old man with another and with it the vagabondness and the old man's addiction to communication is given a meaning or justification in retrospect, since she only adhered to the theoretical rules of her husband. Thus, due to his own rationalization attempts, he cannot ultimately see himself as a rejected victim of his failed marital relationship.

In unshaken belief in his life lie, the old man apparently leaves the café completely satisfied with himself and his world (“happy”, p. 147) with a radiant smile (“bright smile”, p. 156) to begin his journey and search for to continue with other everyday objects for his love full of optimism. The open end of the short story also announces the attitude towards life of the Beat Generation of the 1950s.

The old man's message is aimed at the equally central figure of the newspaper boy, who helps to break or weaken his perspective or view: the boy's incomprehensible questions clearly show that his childlike nature is overwhelmed by such communication or instruction is.

With the almost oracular words "He is a minor" (p. 148), Leo also stands before him, half warning, half protective. Obviously, the old man's messages are “phony” (“false”) for the boy in his still childish world of life and experience; he is unable or unwilling to grasp the meaning of the old man's statements.

When, in his embarrassment and uncertainty, he asks the woman's name, he receives the answer, for example: “I called her Dodo. But that is immaterial ”. (Eng. "I called her Dodo. But it doesn't matter," p. 151). In the nightmarish , impressionistic memory and perception of the old man, the woman has no individuality , is merely an object that can be exchanged at will; Such a point of view is naturally closed to the boy's horizon of experience and understanding.

Likewise, his question of whether the old man had ever seen the woman again meets with her indifference or incomprehension; the woman, who from the child's point of view is quite serious, cannot touch the old man in his platonic-imaginary world of ideas. The two interlocutors talk completely past each other; the dialogue between the two, which has degenerated into the old man's monologue, ultimately only illustrates the lack of mutual communication and understanding of the two protagonists .

In this way Carson McCullers also takes up the fundamental theme of human loneliness in modern American society in A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud . In addition to the loneliness of the old man who has been looking for his wife for eleven years, there is the loneliness of the ageless café owner Leo, who in his “all-night café” (p. 147) became a “critic of craziness” (Eng. “ Critic of Madness ”, p. 157). Just as lonely, the adolescent boy, who is still “new on the paper round” (“new on the paper round”, p. 152), leaves the café at the end; the loneliness resulting from the old man's unfulfilled or unrequited love has such an effect beyond the end of the story.

Structurally, A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud follows the “basic scheme of the implementation of literary models in the specifically McCuller world of experience and images”. In thematic terms, this includes the “triple jump from thesis, antithesis and synthesis, from the isolated self, the fruitless encounter between the self and the world and the retreat of the self enriched by an experience”. With this "science of love" and the appropriately adapted, strangely inanimate metaphors in the short story, a form of love is stylized that is aimed solely at masturbation and therefore not at any specific person or at any specific object, since it does not have an individualizable response or mutual fulfillment is required.

The title of the short story can also be understood in terms of a thematic triple jump; The key words tree, rock, cloud result in a "progression from animate to inanimate nature and from this in turn to the realm of the supernatural, for example into the world of dreams, of illusion, into the cloud-cuckoo land of the lie of life," which it said to the old Man allows one to go on living complacent, even if “empty”, that is, without a purpose in life that could mean hope.

Impact history

The café as an interior or scene of the event is part of the standard repertoire in Carson McCullers' literary work as a place of human warmth or communication as well as self-discovery. In the same way, the café owner is one of the recurring characters in the fictional world of the author. Here, however, Leo, unlike the contemplative - compassionate Biff Brannon in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, shows himself to be a "bitter and stingy" ("bitter and stingy", pp. 147 and 152) cynic who repeatedly tries to break the conversation between to disturb or even prevent the old man and the newsboy.

However, by explicitly negating the boy's question about the old man's drunkenness or drug addiction in the final part of the story and implicitly denying the old man's question about possible madness through silence, in the end he gives the conversation a kind of authenticity . In this narrative function, Leo represents a male reincarnation or modern version of Thomas Mann's Sesemi Weichbrodt in the Buddenbrooks , which with its final affirmative “It's so!” Testifies to the authenticity of the story.

The title of the short story alludes to Thomas Wolfe's poem A Leaf, a Stone, a Door from Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life. ( Look homeward, angel. A Tale of Buried Life , 1929).

Structurally, parallels between A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud and Ernest Hemingway's short story The Killers can also be seen, especially with regard to the perspective of the adolescent protagonist . Similar to Hemingway, McCullers also uses the imagery of the café and the rain in A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud and uses stylistic means extremely economically and effectively. Carson McCullers shows with her penchant for the expressive “dead pan” technique (“I am talking about love”, p. 150) and the lapidar, generous handling of time (“And just forget those two years”, p. 152) similarities to Hemingway in this narrative.

With regard to the connection of the newspaper and “speakeasy” milieus with the didactic motif or the topic of coping with life, however, in A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud, literary-historical references to Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) can be found.

The theme of unrequited love, the failure of interpersonal communication and the fundamental loneliness of man in the modern world takes Carson McCullers herself in her short novel The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) as well as in her novel The Member of the Wedding (dt. The Girl Frankie , 1946) again. Here she makes her subject less abstract or more complex and full of life, but at least in The Ballad of the Sad Café reinforces the nihilistic tendencies inherent in A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud .

A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud , for its part, had a significant impact on Albee's The Zoo Story (1958). Thematically, Albee's one-act play is also about loneliness and the nature of (unrequited) love or the frustrating experience of the failure of a love affair. Structurally, there are similarities or parallels in Albee's short drama, which had previously dealt intensively with Carson McCuller's work. Jerry, the protagonist in The Zoo Story , suddenly assaults his interlocutor with his monologue-like story as does the old man in A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud ; In addition, Jerry's story has numerous similarities in content and intertextual references to McCuller's story.

In the same way as the old man with his "science of love" in Carson McCuller's short story, the protagonist Jerry in Albee's The Zoo Story is convinced that the ability to love is only learned through the gradual increase in the attention of inanimate objects to human beings must be developed.

Adaptations

In 1978, A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud provided the literary basis for a 19-minute short film with Dana Andrews as the leading actor.

Secondary literature

  • Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , pp. 48-54.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The short story is quoted in the following from the reprint in the Penguin edition of The Ballad of the Sad Café , Harmondsworth 1963. This anthology was first published in 1951 by Houghton Mifflin Verlag in New York . The first German translation was published in 1961 by Diogenes Verlag in Zurich and has since been published in numerous new editions by other publishers, such as the Insel Verlag in Leipzig .
  2. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 49 f. and 53.
  3. ^ Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 49.
  4. ^ Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 49. See also Ihab Hassan: Carson McCullers . In: Ihab Hassan: Radical Innocence - Studies in the Contemporary American Novel . Harper & Row Verlag, New York 1966, pp. 205-229. Hassan sees in A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud the germ of Carson McCuller's "Doctrine of Love" ("the germ of her doctrine of love", p. 227).
  5. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 49 f.
  6. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 50.
  7. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 50.
  8. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 50 f.
  9. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 51 f.
  10. ^ Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 51 f. See also: Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers . In: Martin Christadler (Ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 1–21, here p. 8 f.
  11. ^ Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 52 f.
  12. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 48 f.
  13. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 50. See also the text edition of Wolfes novel on Project Gutenberg : Look homeward, Angel .
  14. ↑ See also Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 51.
  15. ↑ See also Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 51.
  16. ↑ See Klaus-Jürgen Popp: Carson McCullers, "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud" (1942) . In: Peter Freese (ed.): The American Short Story of the Present: Interpretations . Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-503-01225-7 , p. 53.
  17. ↑ See Leonard G. Heldreth: From Reality to Fantasy: Displacement and Death in Albee's Zoo Story in detail on these diverse correspondences, parallels and intertextual references in Albee's one-act act . In: Michele K. Langford (Ed.): Contours of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Eighth International Conference in the Fantastic of the Arts . Greenwood Press, New York 1990, ISBN 0-313-26647-6 , pp. 19-28, here pp. 22 ff.
  18. ^ A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud (1978) . On: IMDb . Retrieved July 1, 2014.