The Encounter with the Nocturnal Side of thePsyche : Truman Capote’s A Tree of Night
FUJITA Hideki

Some of Truman Capote’s short stories share the motif of the encounter of theprotagonist with a mysterious stranger. For the protagonist, the encounter is a shocking
and disruptive experience which shakes the foundation of his/her familiar reality. And
there is a suggestion that the mysterious stranger is closely associated with somethingthat the protagonist harbors deep within him/herself. In A Tree of Night and Other
Stories, Capote’s first collection of short fiction, for example, such stories as Miriam，
The Headless Hawk， and A Tree of Night have this motif in common.
This study is concerned with A Tree of Night， the final work and the title story in thecollection, which portrays the eerie journey of the protagonist. The action takes place on
the night train that a young woman named Kay takes on her way back from her uncle’s
funeral to college. What is most striking about this story is that it is pervaded with theimagery of death. This imagery is repeatedly inspired by coldness, the atmosphere of
decay, funerals, coffins, and the metaphors of being devoured. And Kay goes through asymbolic death, an experience which suggests her journey as a metaphoric initiatorytransition. On the train, she encounters a freakish couple, both of whom have no nameand are referred to, respectively, as the man and the woman． Interestingly, the freaks
are presented as beings who are simultaneously alien and familiar to Kay. In the courseof the night journey, the grotesque couple throw her into a state of psychic collapse. In
this way， A Tree of Night describes the gradual disintegration of the protagonist
through the encounter with a strangely familiar other．


The first scene of A Tree of Night depicts the cold, windy, and deserted platform on
which Kay waits for her train in a winter evening：

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It was winter. A string of naked富山大学人文学部紀要

light bulbs, from which it seemed all warmth had been drained, illuminated the little
depot’s cold, windy platform （206）. The images of coldness, symbolic of death（Vries 107），
set the prevailing mood for the rest of the story. That Kay is on her way back to college
after having attended the funeral of an uncle intensifies the macabre atmosphere ; italso suggests that she is under the dominant influence of death. And she carries a green
Western guitar, the only thing the uncle has left her. The color green is at times linked
with death in Capote’s works. In The Headless Hawk， for example, that color serves tohighlight the paralysis of the protagonist’s identity in association with the image of being
below the sea（175）. Thus, the green guitar carried by Kay may be seen as the shadow ofdeath that has haunted her since the funeral of the uncle.
The first scene also creates the atmosphere of ominousness through monster imagery.
Icicles hung along the station-house eaves are described as being like some crystal
monster’s vicious teeth（206）. And the train, which emerges from the darkness，
spouting steam and glaring with light（206），also suggests an image of a monster. Thus,
Kay’s entry into the train can be likened to the swallowing up of her in the belly of amonster and hence takes on the quality of symbolic death.
The last coach Kay enters is described as follows :The coach was a relic with a decaying interior of ancient red-plush seats, bald in
spots, and peeling iodine-colored woodwork. An old-time copper lamp, attached tothe ceiling, looked romantic and out of place. Gloomy dead smoke sailed the air ;and the car’s heated closeness accentuated the stale odor of discarded sandwiches,
apple cores, and orange hulls : this garbage, including Lily cups, soda-pop bottles,
and mangled newspapers, littered the long aisle. From a water cooler, embedded in
the wall, a steady stream trickled to the floor. The passengers, who glanced up
wearily when Kay entered, were not, it seemed, at all conscious of any discomfort．
（206-7）The images of decay and rot help to stress the atmosphere of lifelessness. Kay takes the
only vacant seat of the coach in an isolated alcove（207）where an uncanny couple has
settled in the opposite seat. The location of her seat in the isolated area suggests that
she becomes further separated from reality and enters an unfamiliar realm. That theseat is the only vacant one in the coach induces a sense of inescapable doom. When the

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The Encounter with the Nocturnal Side of the Psyche : Truman Capote’s A Tree of Night

train starts， a ghost of steam hissed against the window（207）. In this way, the openingof the story produces a macabre and ominous atmosphere.
The freakish couple themselves are freighted with the imagery of death. The woman
tells Kay that she and her male companion perform a burial show in which they reenact
the biblical story of Lazarus. The man, who plays the role of Lazarus, is buried alive.
That is, he is associated with the corpse. Indeed, through his eyes like a pair of clouded
milky-blue marbles and his face which had no real expression （208-9），he takes on theappearance of the corpse. And Kay thought she recognized an odd parallel
man’s face and her uncle’s：between thethere was about the man’s face the same kind of shocking,embalmed, secret stillness （213）．
Kay’s weird night journey, which is pervaded with such a nightmarish, deathlike
atmosphere, seems to take on the quality of initiation. Her entry into the train
represents the detachment from her familiar reality, a state which corresponds to thephase of separation. She then finds herself in the dark realm of death, an experiencereminiscent of the descent into the underworld. This horrible experience on the train
marks the phase of margin, which is frequently likened to death（Turner 95）. Indeed,
Kay undergoes a terrible inner alteration, which takes on the quality of symbolic death.
She gradually loses contact with reality and her sense of herself as autonomous andcoherent. When the woman asks her where she is from， Kay was unable to provide ananswer. The names of several cities came to her all at once （210）. In addition, she fails
to ask the conductor to find her a different seat because the request stuttered on her lips
incoherently（212）. Finally, she is thrown into a state where she needed the reassuranceof her own voice and says：

We’re in Alabama now, I think, and tomorrow we ll be in

Atlanta and I’m nineteen and I’ll be twenty in August and I’m a sophomore （215）. Here,she desperately tries to assure herself of her identity because it is breaking down.


It is the weird couple who function as the agents of disintegration for her. Like
Capote’s other mysterious-stranger figures such as D.J. in The Headless Hawk and thelittle girl in Miriam， each of the couple is a freakish character. Kay first looks at the
woman and becomes aware of her unusual appearance :She was short ; her feet barely scraped the floor. And like many undersized people

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she had a freak of structure, in her case an enormous, really huge head. Rouge sobrightened her sagging, flesh-featured face it was difficult even to guess at her
age : perhaps fifty, fifty-five. Her big sheep eyes squinted, as if distrustful of what
they saw. Her hair was an obviously dyed red, and twisted into parched, fatcorkscrew curls. A once-elegant lavender hat of impressive size flopped crazily on
the side of her head, and she was kept busy brushing back a drooping cluster ofcelluloid cherries sewed to the brim．
（208）

Kay then turns her attention to the man. According to the woman， He’s afflicted :deaf and dumb (208). Further, he appears to be mentally disabled. And he is describedas follows :The man slumped in the seat, swung his head sideways, and studied Kay intently
from the corners of his eyes. These eyes, like a pair of clouded milky-blue marbles,
were thickly lashed and oddly beautiful. Now, except for a certain remoteness, hiswide, hairless face had no real expression. It was as if he were incapable ofexperiencing or reflecting the slightest emotion. His gray hair was clipped closeand combed forward into uneven bangs. He looked like a child aged abruptly bysome uncanny method．
（208-9）For Kay, the woman and particularly the man are ambiguous beings. As I have alreadymentioned, the man is simultaneously alien and vaguely familiar. He is, for Kay, abizarre and outlandish being, but at the same time there is a quality about him that
reminds her of something unnameable and indefinable： something about him, an elusive
quality she could not quite put a finger on, reminds her of―of what？（209）. In thecourse of the journey with the couple, Kay has the strange sensation that [a]lthough she
had never made this trip before, the train was traveling through an area strangely
familiar（214-15）. Towards the end of the story, the man reminds Kay of what she wasafraid ：it was a memory, a childish memory of terrors that once, long ago, had hovered
above her like haunted limbs on a tree of night. Aunts, cooks, strangers―eacheager to spin a tale or teach a rhyme of spooks and death, omens, spirits, demons.

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The Encounter with the Nocturnal Side of the Psyche : Truman Capote’s A Tree of Night

And always there had been the unfailing threat of the wizard man : stay close to
the house, child, else a wizard man’ll snatch you and eat you alive! He lived
everywhere, the wizard man, and everywhere was danger. At night, in bed, hear
him tapping at the window? Listen！（215-16）

All this suggests that the man is subtly linked with something dormant inside Kay ; that
he embodies her buried, hidden self. Considered thus, the woman’s following words are
telling：a train’s the place for putting your cards on the table（208）.

The ambiguity of the man expresses itself also as the quality of being at once
disgusting and fascinating. He

made her[Kay] squeamish, but she could not take her

eyes off him （209）. Kay also

felt for him a keen sense of pity ; but also, and this she

could not suppress, an overpowering disgust, an absolute loathing（209）. In cultural
terms, freaks are often considered beings who take on this ambiguous quality :The freak is an object of simultaneous horror and fascination because, in addition
to whatever infirmities or abilities he or she exhibits, the freak is an ambiguous
being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life.
Freaks are those human beings who exist outside and in defiance of the structureof binary oppositions that govern our basic concepts and modes of self-definition....
Freaks cross theborders that divide thesubject fromallambiguities,

interconnections, and reciprocal classifications, outside of or beyond the human.
They imperil the very definitions we rely on to classify humans, identities, andsexes―our most fundamental categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing
self from otherness.（Grosz 57）

In short, freaks represent beings who confound cultural categories. Indeed, the same istrue of the freakish couple : they look simultaneously old and young ; they put on an
occult show, thereby blurring the distinction between reality and illusion ; the man
resides on the boundary that separates life from death. And, for Kay, the couple
represent the subversive inner otherness that threatens the unity and identity of thesubject. They embody what must be expelled or repressed to construct and secure Kay as
a conscious, unified, rational subject. The man’s irrational attributes, in particular, arethrown into relief. As we have seen, he is inextricably linked with Kay’s unconscious ;

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his deafness and muteness may suggest that he is outside language and meaning. He is arepulsive being for Kay in that as her alienated, other self that irrupts from within her,
he threatens to rupture her outward, socially acceptable self. The imagery of being
devoured can also be seen in the description of the

wizard man

as a being who will

snatch you and eat you alive． This image suggests the dissolution of the self throughits engulfment in disruptive otherness.
What is interesting about the man is that he is also strangely enticing to Kay. The
protagonist’s inexplicable fascination with his/her other self can also be seen in Miriam
and The Headless Hawk． While Kay feels a strong repulsion for the man, she finds
herself entrapped into obeying him by some irresistible force. Towards the end of thestory, she manages to escape from the couple to the observation platform, but [t]heintense cold made her head ache, and she longed to go back inside the warm coach andfall asleep（215）. This observation platform, it may seem, symbolizes her separate,bounded self, in which she feels distressed and helpless. She returns to the alcove as if
she were under the spell of the man. Then she agrees to buy a love charmfrom him,

namely to surrender herself to the overwhelming force of the inner other. Finally, shefalls into a calm, hypnotic trance and has the strange sensation that the man’s face
seemed to change form and recede before her like a moon-shaped rock sliding downward
under a surface of water（216）. This state points to the dissolution of Kay as a conscious,
knowing subject. The woman takes away Kay’s purse and gently pulled the raincoat likea shroud above her head（216）. This act of taking the purse brings to mind moral theft（105）as described in

Master Misery， which signifies the act of stealing a person’s self

and identity. And the image of a shroud suggests that Kay is doomed to be buried alive
as the bride of the man, who, in the burial show， wears a gorgeous made-to-orderbridegroom suit（212）. This final episode reveals that the imagery of sexuality, which we
see earlier in the story in such things as the peach seed and the love charm, is closely
connected with death. Helen S. Garson interprets Kay’s purse as a symbol of vagina andremarks that the final episode, with sex and death intimately intertwined, suggests a
rape, through which the wizard man has gained Kay as his bride（7-8）. In my view, theimagery of death fuses with that of sexuality in that both signify continuity, nondifferentiation, the annihilation of separate, individual self and identity. Kay’s experienceon the train represents that of the disintegration of the self and identity through theirimmersion in the inner otherness and the resulting dissolution of the boundaries which

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The Encounter with the Nocturnal Side of the Psyche : Truman Capote’s A Tree of Nightsecure the normal subject in its identity.


The motif of double personality is one of Capote’s major preoccupations. He repeatedly
dramatizes the conflict between the warring selves. In A Tree of Night， the protagonist
is repelled by the erosion of her conscious, rational self through the encounter with her
threatening other self. But at the same time, she is attracted to the weird double who
can break and redefine the limits of her subjectivity. In other words, this story revolves
around her oscillation between the horror of dissolution by theof incorporation in theother and the pleasureother． This ambivalence suggests Capote’s insights into humansubjectivity : that the conscious, unified, rational subject is constructed through theexclusion and repression of the other ; that the other can be liberating and integrative.

Works Cited
Capote, Truman． The Headless Hawk． The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night andOther Stories. New York : Signet，1980. 175―95．
―． Master Misery． The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night and Other Stories. New York :Signet，1980. 101―18．
―． A Tree of Night． The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night and Other Stories. New
York : Signet，1980. 206―16．
Garson, Helen S. Truman Capote : A Study of the Short Fiction. New York : Twayne，
1992．
Grosz, Elizabeth． Intolerable Ambiguity : Freaks as/at the Limit． Freakery : Cultural
Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York :New York UP，1996. 55―66．
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process : Structure and Anti-Structure．1969．Ithaca : Cornell
UP，1977．
Vries, Ad de. Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery. Amsterdam : North-Holland，1974．

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