What It Is
The tree and the cloud are what remains when no name is left. They appear twice in the novel, and in both Vitangelo Moscarda uses them to speak of what he wants: in Book II, the cloud is the desire attributed to the reader, to no longer be conscious of being, like a stone or a plant; in Book VIII, the tree and the cloud are what Vitangelo says he is. Between the two appearances the tree passes through other states: the wood of the chair that creaks to the song of the bird in the cage, a plant clipped and combed in the city's streets, a chestnut tree stirred by the wind in the countryside. The ending gathers everything into a sentence of identification, and it is there that the symbol works.
Where It Appears
In ch. IX of Book II, lying in the grass, looking at the clouds and listening to the wind in the chestnut trees, the reader wishes, through Vitangelo's mouth, what the novel will take seriously only at the end:
Ah, non aver più coscienza d’essere, come una pietra, come una pianta! Non ricordarsi più neanche del proprio nome!, ah, to have no more consciousness of being, like a stone, like a plant! To no longer remember even one's own name!
The answer from Vitangelo undoes the wish at once: if someone says "clouds and wind," he has already recognized what he sees, and recognizing is consciousness. The cloud does not know it is a cloud; neither the tree nor the stone knows of it, nor of themselves, and they are alone.
In ch. VI of Book II the tree had been something else: the walnut tree reduced to a chair, in a chapter where the imprisoned bird and the walnut tree perhaps understand each other through a song and a creak:
Forse s’intendono, con quel canto e con questo scricchiolìo, l’uccello imprigionato e il noce ridotto seggiola., perhaps they understand each other, with that song and this creak, the imprisoned bird and the walnut tree reduced to a chair.
In ch. XI of Book II, entering the city, Vitangelo shows the reader the trees of the Corso di Porta Vecchia, clipped and combed, with a lost air, and imagines that perhaps, to grow, they need silence. In the Olivella square, every year the earth tries to reclaim the square with threads of grass between the paving stones, and every year four or five street cleaners pull them up. In ch. II of Book VIII, already convalescing, he strokes the green down of the coverlet and sees in it a wheat field. And in ch. IV of Book VIII, at the end of the novel, the wish of Book II comes true by the reverse route:
Sono quest’albero. Albero, nuvola; domani libro o vento: il libro che leggo, il vento che bevo. Tutto fuori, vagabondo., I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow a book or the wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, a vagabond.
The regime that keeps this life going is a way of looking:
Volto subito gli occhi per non vedere più nulla fermarsi nella sua apparenza e morire. Così soltanto io posso vivere, ormai. Rinascere attimo per attimo. Impedire che il pensiero si metta in me di nuovo a lavorare, e dentro mi rifaccia il vuoto delle vane costruzioni., I turn my eyes away at once, so as not to see anything stop in its appearance and die. Only so can I live now: to be reborn moment by moment, to keep thought from setting itself to work in me again and remaking within me the void of vain constructions.
The city's bells, which reach him from afar, he now hears not within himself but outside, ringing on their own: there are those who still need to think about death and to pray, and the bells speak for them. And the last sentence joins what the whole book set in opposition:
Io non l’ho più questo bisogno, perchè muojo ogni attimo, io, e rinasco nuovo e senza ricordi: vivo e intero, non più in me, ma in ogni cosa fuori., I no longer have this need, because I die every moment, I, and am reborn new and without memories: alive and whole, no longer in myself, but in every thing outside.
What It Means
The tree and the cloud are the opposite of the house. Where the house is matter that man takes and shapes, the tree and the cloud are what exists without construction and without a name. The desire of Book II, to be a stone or a plant, is refused by Vitangelo on one argument: whoever says "cloud" has already left what he wanted. Book VIII fulfills it when there is no longer anyone to say it, and for that reason the identification is radical: Vitangelo does not observe the tree, he is the tree, and tomorrow he will be the book he reads or the wind he drinks. This is the point where Identity stops being a problem for whoever seeks it, because no one is left to seek.
In The Late Mattia Pascal, another novel by Pirandello, Mattia is left without identity and unable to regain it, and what remains to him is the shadow of a living man. Vitangelo is left without identity and without wanting to regain it, and what remains to him is the instant. The difference is that he chooses, or accepts, the loss, and the text does not make clear whether this is liberation or dissolution: the tree that breathes with new leaves is an image of life, and it is also that of someone who answers for nothing. The judge's scene in ch. II of Book VIII already showed the possibility with the green coverlet, and the question of whether the coverlet does not seem beautiful to him is what Vitangelo offers the judge in place of an explanation.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Identity, Solitude and isolation, God and the divine.
- Themes in the work: Identity, Solitude and isolation, God and the divine.
- Characters: Vitangelo Moscarda.
- Related symbols: the house, the construction that the ending undoes, and the mirror, which he stops looking for when he becomes the tree.