The Giving Tree
Article
The Giving Tree is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 16, 2022 and April 20, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “here’s Teach on The Giving Tree”; “The entire childish fantasy of “motherly love” collapses the moment obligation enters into it, which is why, in The Giving Tree, it never does”; “The Giving Tree is an anagram for I Get Even, Right ?“. It most often appears alongside Coke, Freud, Lacan.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 16, 2022
- Last seen: April 20, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Coke (2 shared issues)
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- Freud (2 shared issues)
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- Lacan (2 shared issues)
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- Sadly, Porn (2 shared issues)
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- Shel Silverstein (2 shared issues)
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- Teach (2 shared issues)
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- The Last Psychiatrist (2 shared issues)
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- A.E. Waite (1 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
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- Adlerian psychology (1 shared issues)
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- AL (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Power (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Some are outright psychoanalytic dream interpretations, and the rest draw from this tradition. The underlying theory is that every work of art (including porno) is an expression of some repressed desire, which has to be different from the open desires (so eg Oedipus can’t really be about marrying your mother, because Oedipus openly marries his mother). So for example, here’s Teach on The Giving Tree - yes, this is a long quote, but a review this book won’t make sense until you see the kind of thing he’s doing:
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.
But maybe none of it is "actual points", and those are just the bits that fit in with my worldview; maybe that's what The Giving Tree feels like to somebody who takes it as some kind of truth.
Seems like an interesting book. Teach's interpretation of "The Giving Tree" feels right to me, actually. It doesn't matter what Shel Silverstein intended it to mean; the point is that there's another reading that actually makes more sense, that gets behind the book's saccharine sentimentality to reveal a deeper and more credible psychology. Art is like that, if it's worth anything at all; it says things the artist didn't know he was saying. That the tree is less a mother than an idealized fantasy of motherhood with no correspondence to reality seems obviously correct, at least, and Teach makes some very good points about the relationship between love and obligation.