Ei se ole kärsimysidentiteetti, vaan identiteetti on suoja kärsimystä vastaan.
Take a look back at Shel Silverstein’s 60s storyboard, The Giving Tree. Here’s an invalid but reliable statistical observation: if you sell 7 million copies of a book with a positive message and it doesn’t make people live the message, then they didn’t get that message. What they did get was a very strong defense against the actual message, see also The Gospel Of Mark.
It’s universally agreed that The Giving Tree represents a mother. This is a very odd association to make, because it’s clearly not a mother, it’s a tree, if it was a mother than [sic] the boy would be a sapling. “It’s literally a tree, but the tree is a metaphor.” Obviously it’s a metaphor, what I want to know is why you chose the wrong one. The boy is a biped and has a human girlfriend; the fact that the story requires organisms from two different kingdoms not only complicates the possibility it represents a mother, it requires the reader to force the interpretation on the book, to “do violence to the text”. You know, like rape.
Why do you think it’s a mother? It gives and gives and gives and asks nothing in return, but that’s not what defines “a mother”, that’s how your mother defines herself. In fact, the fundamental characteristic that would make it a “mother” is explicitly absent from the story, and that’s responsibility to the boy. The Tree has none.
It may be nice to him, it may sometimes let him win at hide and seek, it may give him a boat, but it doesn’t have to punish him, it doesn’t have to protect him, it doesn’t have to worry about teaching him to swim or warning against gold digging hippies, it doesn’t have to make him sad/angry/scared for his own good. “I just want him to be happy”. That’s it? The tree isn’t his mother. At best, it’s his godmother. Uh oh.
So the question you have to ask your pop rocks and triple cola conscience is not why you thought it was a mother, but why you wanted it to be a mother. “Because it acts selflessly out of love?” Boy oh boy are you way off.
The trick to what the demographic wants, and this may sound familiar, is that while it doesn’t believe in “true love” between two people, it doesn’t believe in true love of a parent for a child either. Parental love can’t be true love because it is definitional, obligatory, and therefore it doesn’t count. What the demo believes in, what it aspires to, is unconditional love chosen by free will - that can be witnessed and confirmed by other people as an act of free will. To the demo, rather than the symbolic obligation being both the requirement for love and its justification, the symbolic obligation negates it. This is the form of love you and the other adult readers are capable of - of imagining. That’s why it’s a tree. Since there’s no cultural or even biological responsibility to love this boy, then this love is (depicted as) real love.
The desire to display gigawatt devotion with zero responsibility is the standard maneuver of our times, note the trend of celebrity soundbite social justice, or children’s fascination with doing the extra credit more than the regular credit, and as a personal observation this is exactly what’s wrong with medical students and nurses. They’ll spend hours talking with a patient about their lives and feelings while fluffing their pillow to cause it to be true that they are devoted - they chose to act, chose to love - while acts solely out of ordinary duty are devalued if not completely avoided. “Well, I believe the patient’s spirituality is very important.” It will be if you don’t get this NG tube in. You may think you have very valid personal reasons for not wanting to assume responsibility, like apathy or minimum wages, but the overwhelming motivator for devotion by choice is the rewarding reward of giving gifts of oneself, seemingly selflessly, because these publicly “count” more than discharging duty. The retort to this is that often times the selfless acts are done out of everyone else’s sight, so what possible reward could there be? But one doesn’t need to be seen by individual people, it’s enough to imagine being seen by a hypothetical audience. […]
The entire childish fantasy of “motherly love” collapses the moment obligation enters into it, which is why, in The Giving Tree, it never does, and this is why so many remain deeply attached to it as a mother figure. It doesn’t represent a mother - the wish is that it could. Tree-mothers will do anything to convey devotion and “love” - because there is no obligation to do it. They are willing to sacrifice, to give of themselves, to convey the appearance of suffering and sacrifice even by actually suffering and sacrificing - they’ll cut off their own arms to prove it, in order to assure themselves and a love object too guilty to be suspicious that they do it all out of willful, chosen love. “I love!” But can you help me with my math homework? No? Fine, I’ll just go back to wetting the bed and playing with matches. The desire for it to be a mother also satisfies within the adult reader the childish desire to be special: if only my mother did these things for me because she loved me and not because she had to - not because she would have been similarly obligated to any of her meiotic anomalies. Because then it would count.
Why would Tree-mothers so reliably avoid acting out of responsibility, but might perform the very same acts out of “love”? Why is this kind of mothering so aspirational, celebrated? What’s so bad about obligation that it needs to shrouded [sic] in “love”, or outright resisted?
Because obligatory mothering means you matter less than your replacement, no thanks, my place in the world is unique. And the uniqueness is signaled by regular, public gifts of themselves, not public in the studio audience sense, but public in the storyboard sense, the potentiality of an audience that doesn’t need to exist. “I’ve sacrificed so much to give you a boat.” But shouldn’t you teach me to boat so I can boat for a lifetime? No? That’s Dad’s job? Got it.
Your desire to be a selfless godmother may imply you’re a bad person, but it doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad for the kid, he still gets a boat, right? Can’t self-interest result in positive outcomes for others? Yes, but this isn’t self-interest, it’s self-definition, it is relative to the outcomes of others. In other words, there’s a ledger that needs to be balanced, and the kid is going to pay eventually. The apparent selfless devotion perversely/purposefully obligates the child to them - it causes there to be a debt owed back to the parent which should not exist: the child perceives the existence of such an unpaid debt and thus believes his guilt is warranted. This is the guilt that the adult reader misinterprets as “nostalgia” or “poignancy”. This is entirely separate from the complex duty an adult child owes their parents, which many avoid anyway; this is an unrepayable debt that keeps the child indebted to the parent - in this way precluding the possibility that the child can mature into their replacement, or at all.
The Giving Tree is an anagram for I Get Even, Right? That’s a solid example of the return of the repressed assuming it wasn’t on purpose. So the boy rebels, becomes selfish, he grows up and appears not notice [sic] or not to care that he’s hurting the Tree; but this is inaccurate, his destructive actions should be seen as a response to this debt, to the unfillable gap constituted by the symbolic debt against which his neurosis is a protest.
Not everyone likes the story. There have been a lot of ferocious criticisms of its “theme”. The question is, what is the outcome of these criticisms? Do the criticisms offer an alternative understanding, or do they pretend to criticize in order to maintain the status quo? A popular criticism, heavy with contempt and thus conveniently dismissed as misogyny, is that the Tree “mothered” him too much and failed to foster independence in the child. While this may be factually accurate, it’s even more wrong, it’s the kind of insight that gets you out of having to go any further, it ends your connection to the story - you are done with the book. The criticism that the Tree fails to foster independence presumes it is supposed to do this. But that’s not it’s job. It’s his actual mother’s job, it’s his father’s job. Based on how this little rat turns out it’s clear they failed, but that’s a totally different book, and it’s called Oedipus Tyrannos. The critics say the Tree failed as a mother because they want teaching independence to be the metric of motherhood; but as they are misogynists their true target for redefinition is fatherhood. No one criticized the Tree for failing to teach the boy math, or for self-cutting to guilt him into a debt, its one celebrated failure was not teaching him independence, which, you will observe, is way easier than teaching him math. Consequently it is correct to say that the criticisms of the book pose no threat to the underlying psychology which both haters and admirers share, their ends are the same, both pro and con have succeeded in reprioritizing the myriad defining responsibilities of a parent for the modern age, here they are in full, in order of importance: 1. Foster independence. 2. Other stuff.
Asserting parenting’s main job as fostering independence is not merely self-serving, it’s bad for the kid, and it’s probably correct to say that in modern times we have completely accidentally but nevertheless excessively fostered independence, to the point that dependence of any kind is seen as a moral catastrophe, or at least an easy target for self-righteous indignation. Of course the independence that’s fostered isn’t real independence, it’s green screen individualism, all the dependencies are disavowed or at least fetishized with money; even the money gets fetishized into creidt so he doesn’t even have to see he needs money, the credit card lets him believe he is his own man; and it only makes jarring the instances where independence is utterly impossible, eg medical illness or falling in love. We’ll tolerate a certain amount of material dependence because it doesn’t count, but no way is anyone going to allow an emotional = “pathological” dependence on the other.
“But isn’t pathological dependence just borderline personality disorder?” Border between - what and what? The question you asked about their pathology is a symptom of your pathology. You want the borderline’s pathology to be their pathological overdependence on the other because you don’t want it to be the characteristic that you both share, which is the absence of interest in whether the other can depend on you. The crucial distinction is that while neither of you are dependable, the borderline wants to be seen as dependent and not dependable, whereas you want to be seen as not dependent but as dependable. The borderline may be more thirsty, but it’s still a babbling brook for both of you: can’t live without it, derive no real enjoyment out of it, can’t tell it apart from any other water and often pee in it. The water gets nothing in return from either of you.
If you accept that the boy has an actual biological mother, never seen in the story because the need for her is repressed and thus of no interest to the childish reader, then something else becomes true and changes the genre from kiddie porn to Lovecraftian horror: the man doesn’t keep coming back to the Tree, the man keeps coming home to his actual mother. The Tree is outside waiting for him.
But the claim that the tree fails to foster independence turns out to be literally incorrect, a defense in the form of a criticism. The last sentence of the story is, “And the tree was happy.” Why is she happy? Because the old man has wasted his life and came back to her?
The tree doesn’t fail to foster independence; it actively thwarts the child’s independence at every turn. This may seem hard to believe, she did give him her trunk so he can heed the call of Manifest Destiny, but unless you’re going to chop it up and Huck Finn the pieces into a raft that trunk isn’t going to carry away anything but your optimism. And who taught you to use an axe, your mom? Don’t dismiss the giving of the boat as a contrivance solely for the purpose of furthering the plot, because the contrivance is what the passive agent uses to cause the active agent to act on her desires. She fofered first her apples which were useful and then the wood which she knows is not useful. But instead of first offering the apples and then referring him to the 2 ton cedar trees in the next forest or at the very least a boat maker, she offers him what couldn’t possibly satisfy him. “I hope the scent reminds you of me”. You know he’ll be back in a week, when was he going to forget?
The tree isn’t giving “of itself” because it has nothing else to offer, it is giving of itself because it doesn’t want the boy to want anything else. But this selfishness is totally opposed to how the Tree views itself - a kind, loving, giving Tree - so it is necessary to disavow this. To hide that thought from herself - not the boy, but herself - she is willing to chop parts of her body off for him, as long as those parts don’t do him any good. The magnitude of sacrifice is illusory even if it fools other people as well, it looks huge to the outside, which is why that part was chosen for sacrifice - but it is of only passing value to the boy. The sacrifice hides to herself her attempts to keep the boy unsatisfied, wanting more. The last page of the book shows the man come full circle, sitting on the stump. “And the tree was happy”. Which was the whole point.
In other words, the GIving Tree is a giant cunt. Take it easy, that’s not me saying it, that’s Silverstein: in a later comic, he drew a picture of a man approaching a cave that looks like the top part of the Giving Tree and all of a 60s mom’s vagina, I’ll wait, and the guy goes in but doesn’t come out. The title of the comic is “And He Was Never Heard From Again.” Well I have a question: is the cave happy? Anybody want to tell me why?
It’s important to ask: if the Tree’s target is the boy, even into adulthood, why does it continue to position itself as a mother - instead of as one of the historically reliable poses for manipulating adult men such as a wife, lover, or damsel in distress?
Because she doesn’t know what he wants. The only thing she knows about him is that he keeps coming home to his real mother. But hold on - I don’t mean she tries to be a mother because that’s what she thinks the boy wants. She doesn’t know what he wants. Stop here, read that all again. But his mom must know - it’s why he keeps coming back to her. So the Tree identifies with the mother in order to figure out what the boy wants; not like Special Agent Empath who “gets inside the head” of the criminal, but like a high end escort or high priced psychoanalyst. She has no idea what the guy lying beneath her wants; the only thing she knows about him is that he thinks escorts and psychoanalysts would know. So she doesn’t guess what he wants: she simply stays in character as the one who is supposed to know, and waits for the man to act.
Of course escorts and psychoanalysts get paid, ie the ledger is immediately balanced. In the Tree’s case, however, no payment is forthcoming; and since it is an arithmetical necessity that the ledger must balance, it becomes even more important to figure out what he wants, in order to deprive him of it.
