![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries anymore
Yesterday in honor of the date, I watched Larry Yust's The Lottery (1969).
I can't remember when I first read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948). It wasn't for school; that was "After You, My Dear Alphonse" (1943). It might have been in one of the classroom anthologies I always read cover to cover no matter what we were actually assigned out of them—Hawthorne, Bradbury. The house being full of almost every genre of fiction but the realistic, I could equally have found it in The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), the same acid-browned paperback that furnished me with the dustily stomach-sinking despair of "The Daemon Lover" (1949), a story which upset me for reasons I would not be able to articulate for decades. Since the inhabitants of the unnamed village in which Jackson set her parable of the homey barbarities we take for granted so long as they don't come too close to home can no longer remember the origins of their annual rite nor even the particulars of its observance which have worn down over the centuries to a black box filled with slips of paper and the corner of a square piled with stones, it makes sense for the story to feel like something I have always known, as it feels I always knew about year-kings, scapegoats. I imagined it in New England even though the text only commits itself to the close-knit markers of rural America, thus occasioning that subset of the onslaught of letters following its publication which concerned themselves with identifying the location of the practice she had apparently, ethnographically described. I wasn't connecting it with witch trials or the Gothic literature of the region or even some vibe of Jackson's North Bennington, the white-spired college town where she would eventually spend the rest of her rather haunted life. The story merely felt as it was meant to: wherever you read it, like something that could happen here.
So much does the same seem true of the version commissioned by Encyclopædia Britannica as part of their Short-Story Showcase (1969–77) that perhaps in an effort to head off a similar outcry of letters from the parents of its student audience, it subtitles its opening wide shot of a well-trodden strip of ground between census-designated houses and the long awning of a shopping center through which a kid in a ketchup-red windbreaker is wandering, The following is fiction. Despite the occasional dramatically high or low angle on the assembled ring of the crowd and the hands and faces singled out within it, the 16 mm cinematography by Isidore Mankofsky looks most—hand-jostled, post-synched, slightly blown out in the blue haze of sun between summer showers—like a home movie, the amateur record of the year's lottery in eighteen minutes of real time. It tumbles among the boys scrapping for the best stones in the rain-drying field, eavesdrops on the girls who watch them as if from the other side of a school dance, the adults who close up shop for the morning, pull up in their trucks, drift over from household chores. "Steve hates to eat those TV dinners. I don't blame him." "I like Miss Spangler better than I did that second-grade teacher." "You ever hear of taxes going down?" "Then I'm going to finish it off with some lace around the sleeves." Once two men emerge across the parking lot, one carrying a black box and the other a wooden stool, the screenplay adapted by Yust will follow Jackson's dialogue almost word for word, but the writer-director's real fidelity to his source material is the plain ordinariness with which the events of June 27, 1969, since the cars and clothes of the film are distinctly contemporary, play out before the camera's unshocked eye. To the citizens of this tiny, blue-collar community gathering without coercion or secrecy, the routine of the lottery with its methodical double-checking of participants and narration of the rules and finally the finish in time to get back to the day's work is as familiar as the civic business of voting, as normal as May Day on Summerisle. The lots are folded slips of college-ruled paper, the fateful black spots rounded casually in with pencil. If the black-painted wooden box in which the lots are stirred and drawn is as old as its chips and scratches suggest, its padlock could and might well have been bought from the nearest hardware store last week. No one even dresses up for the ceremony—Olive Dunbar's Tessie Hutchinson runs up at the last minute explaining with a self-conscious laugh that she "clean forgot what day it was," while William Benedict's Joe Summers is sworn in as master of the lottery in the white shirt and khaki slacks in which the viewer can imagine him at a cookout or a lodge meeting. His white-haired boyish face and scratchy tenor give him both authority and informality as he assumes his office and begins the roll call: "Do you solemnly swear that you will perform without prejudice or favoritism those duties prescribed by custom and dictated by law?" The film does not ignore the tensions underlying the day; it catches solemn faces and nervous fingers, how tightly the little slips of paper are held or turned over and over like dice still falling. "Seems like only last week we got through with the last one," Blanche Bronte's Jean Delacroix murmurs to Irene Tedrow's Mrs. Graves, who answers with the voice of experience, "Time sure does go fast." Drawing for the first time for himself and his mother, Jack Watson—a still-teenaged Ed Begley Jr., barley-blond gawky in his worn-edged denim jacket—stumbles in his nervousness against the box and is not unsympathetically admonished, "Take your time, son!" He hurries back into place without looking at anyone, as if he's bobbled the job of being a man. But no one weeps, no one hides, children hang off their parents' arms with boredom and even adults mutter around the halfway mark of the alphabet, "I wish they'd hurry." Neither the performances nor the photography ever flip into more conventionally signaled horror than the measured and sudden denouement of Jackson's prose. The sky is clouding over as the boys' rough cairn of stones is reached for, but the ritual goes on rain or shine. Joe Summers has already tucked his pencil and the year's list of names back into his shirt pocket, professionally. "All right, folks. Let's finish quickly."
It isn't more ironic than the original story, but the fleshing out of expressions and deliveries really stamps the Room 101, thee-but-not-for-me quality of the lottery which almost certainly angered the readers of the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker even more than the postulation of modern human sacrifice. Until the second and final round of the drawing winnows her family down to the crumpled smudge of paper her husband has to pull from her rigid fingers, Tessie Hutchinson looks as secure in her community as the wizened, cantankerous fixture of William Fawcett's Old Man Warner, strutting through the crowd in his old-fashioned suit and tie no other man in town wears for the occasion, boasting of his seventy-seven years in the lottery and bristling at the mere suggestion of abandoning the tradition. "Used to be a saying, 'Lottery in June, corn heavy soon.' Next thing we'd know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns . . . There's always been a lottery." She's not a leading citizen, but she's visibly well-liked, joking about her tardiness to the receptive chuckles of the crowd. Remarking with approval on the woman who steps up to draw in place of her absent husband, nudging her own husband forward with the affectionately chiding "Get up there, Bill!" that sends another ripple of amusement through her otherwise sober neighbors, Tessie with the marigold ribbon in her dark bob of hair and the apron she didn't have time to take off from washing up embodies the normality of the lottery, obviously invested in its practice yet not so avid for its payoff that the viewer is encouraged to wait for it to boomerang onto her. Neither Jackson nor Yust offer such reassurances. She accepted what was handed down to her, as literally as we imagine she was once given, like her tow-headed son, too young to do more than cling to it, a child-sized stone. Afterward she would clean her hands on her apron and finish the dishes, smiling faintly as if she had watched a parade pass by. The instant it's a Hutchinson instead of a Martin, Dunbar, Adams in the crosshairs of that bone-pale annual pile, she's interrupting, rules-lawyering, demanding a do-over, defiantly and then frantically resisting the inevitable consequence of a few strokes of graphite on blue-lined paper, the storm-hail of stones against a corrugated blue shed. Here or anywhere else, it always happens to somebody else until it doesn't. "It isn't fair. It isn't fair, it isn't right!" The credits come up over the same wide shot of the field, rain-puddled, the mobbed crowd of people in one corner like the year's store of stones. The one thing the film loses by sticking so strictly to Jackson's dialogue is the stronger sense of the lottery as the dwindled vestige of something much older and much more involved, the chant, the procession, the salute so vaguely recollected that their performance has fallen away from the ritual whose virtue persists without them, if indeed it has any virtue beyond mortaring the community's sense of self with blood, which has sufficed as far back as the walls of Rome, the cities of Cain. I suspect it of being an accident of filming in a couple of small towns in southern California in 1969, but the cast is conspicuously white: the least WASPy name on the roll is Zanini. Of course. Everyone's in-group until somebody needs to be out.
It is not inconceivable that I could have encountered this film in its intended environment of middle or high school. I can remember different English classes screening To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Shane (1953), Of Mice and Men (1992), Romeo and Juliet (1968), even a scene from what it took me almost a quarter of a century to determine had been A Tale of Two Cities (1958), since at the time I registered mostly that it did not contain Ronald Colman and was therefore inauthentic. I had no idea of its educational existence until this spring, when it handily turned up on the Internet Archive. It seemed appropriate to wait to watch it in season, which I can only hope does not contagiously throw the viewer's hat into the ring. Perhaps it doesn't need to. We don't live in a different country from Shirley Jackson, setting her ritual tacitly in her own home town. "It ain't the way it used to be. People ain't the way they used to be." I don't know, Old Man Warner. Stones, blood, corn, who's in and who's out, sometimes it feels like the cars and the clothes are the only things that change. Attagirl, Tessie, indeed. This duty brought to you by my prescribed backers at Patreon.
I can't remember when I first read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948). It wasn't for school; that was "After You, My Dear Alphonse" (1943). It might have been in one of the classroom anthologies I always read cover to cover no matter what we were actually assigned out of them—Hawthorne, Bradbury. The house being full of almost every genre of fiction but the realistic, I could equally have found it in The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), the same acid-browned paperback that furnished me with the dustily stomach-sinking despair of "The Daemon Lover" (1949), a story which upset me for reasons I would not be able to articulate for decades. Since the inhabitants of the unnamed village in which Jackson set her parable of the homey barbarities we take for granted so long as they don't come too close to home can no longer remember the origins of their annual rite nor even the particulars of its observance which have worn down over the centuries to a black box filled with slips of paper and the corner of a square piled with stones, it makes sense for the story to feel like something I have always known, as it feels I always knew about year-kings, scapegoats. I imagined it in New England even though the text only commits itself to the close-knit markers of rural America, thus occasioning that subset of the onslaught of letters following its publication which concerned themselves with identifying the location of the practice she had apparently, ethnographically described. I wasn't connecting it with witch trials or the Gothic literature of the region or even some vibe of Jackson's North Bennington, the white-spired college town where she would eventually spend the rest of her rather haunted life. The story merely felt as it was meant to: wherever you read it, like something that could happen here.
So much does the same seem true of the version commissioned by Encyclopædia Britannica as part of their Short-Story Showcase (1969–77) that perhaps in an effort to head off a similar outcry of letters from the parents of its student audience, it subtitles its opening wide shot of a well-trodden strip of ground between census-designated houses and the long awning of a shopping center through which a kid in a ketchup-red windbreaker is wandering, The following is fiction. Despite the occasional dramatically high or low angle on the assembled ring of the crowd and the hands and faces singled out within it, the 16 mm cinematography by Isidore Mankofsky looks most—hand-jostled, post-synched, slightly blown out in the blue haze of sun between summer showers—like a home movie, the amateur record of the year's lottery in eighteen minutes of real time. It tumbles among the boys scrapping for the best stones in the rain-drying field, eavesdrops on the girls who watch them as if from the other side of a school dance, the adults who close up shop for the morning, pull up in their trucks, drift over from household chores. "Steve hates to eat those TV dinners. I don't blame him." "I like Miss Spangler better than I did that second-grade teacher." "You ever hear of taxes going down?" "Then I'm going to finish it off with some lace around the sleeves." Once two men emerge across the parking lot, one carrying a black box and the other a wooden stool, the screenplay adapted by Yust will follow Jackson's dialogue almost word for word, but the writer-director's real fidelity to his source material is the plain ordinariness with which the events of June 27, 1969, since the cars and clothes of the film are distinctly contemporary, play out before the camera's unshocked eye. To the citizens of this tiny, blue-collar community gathering without coercion or secrecy, the routine of the lottery with its methodical double-checking of participants and narration of the rules and finally the finish in time to get back to the day's work is as familiar as the civic business of voting, as normal as May Day on Summerisle. The lots are folded slips of college-ruled paper, the fateful black spots rounded casually in with pencil. If the black-painted wooden box in which the lots are stirred and drawn is as old as its chips and scratches suggest, its padlock could and might well have been bought from the nearest hardware store last week. No one even dresses up for the ceremony—Olive Dunbar's Tessie Hutchinson runs up at the last minute explaining with a self-conscious laugh that she "clean forgot what day it was," while William Benedict's Joe Summers is sworn in as master of the lottery in the white shirt and khaki slacks in which the viewer can imagine him at a cookout or a lodge meeting. His white-haired boyish face and scratchy tenor give him both authority and informality as he assumes his office and begins the roll call: "Do you solemnly swear that you will perform without prejudice or favoritism those duties prescribed by custom and dictated by law?" The film does not ignore the tensions underlying the day; it catches solemn faces and nervous fingers, how tightly the little slips of paper are held or turned over and over like dice still falling. "Seems like only last week we got through with the last one," Blanche Bronte's Jean Delacroix murmurs to Irene Tedrow's Mrs. Graves, who answers with the voice of experience, "Time sure does go fast." Drawing for the first time for himself and his mother, Jack Watson—a still-teenaged Ed Begley Jr., barley-blond gawky in his worn-edged denim jacket—stumbles in his nervousness against the box and is not unsympathetically admonished, "Take your time, son!" He hurries back into place without looking at anyone, as if he's bobbled the job of being a man. But no one weeps, no one hides, children hang off their parents' arms with boredom and even adults mutter around the halfway mark of the alphabet, "I wish they'd hurry." Neither the performances nor the photography ever flip into more conventionally signaled horror than the measured and sudden denouement of Jackson's prose. The sky is clouding over as the boys' rough cairn of stones is reached for, but the ritual goes on rain or shine. Joe Summers has already tucked his pencil and the year's list of names back into his shirt pocket, professionally. "All right, folks. Let's finish quickly."
It isn't more ironic than the original story, but the fleshing out of expressions and deliveries really stamps the Room 101, thee-but-not-for-me quality of the lottery which almost certainly angered the readers of the June 26, 1948 issue of The New Yorker even more than the postulation of modern human sacrifice. Until the second and final round of the drawing winnows her family down to the crumpled smudge of paper her husband has to pull from her rigid fingers, Tessie Hutchinson looks as secure in her community as the wizened, cantankerous fixture of William Fawcett's Old Man Warner, strutting through the crowd in his old-fashioned suit and tie no other man in town wears for the occasion, boasting of his seventy-seven years in the lottery and bristling at the mere suggestion of abandoning the tradition. "Used to be a saying, 'Lottery in June, corn heavy soon.' Next thing we'd know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns . . . There's always been a lottery." She's not a leading citizen, but she's visibly well-liked, joking about her tardiness to the receptive chuckles of the crowd. Remarking with approval on the woman who steps up to draw in place of her absent husband, nudging her own husband forward with the affectionately chiding "Get up there, Bill!" that sends another ripple of amusement through her otherwise sober neighbors, Tessie with the marigold ribbon in her dark bob of hair and the apron she didn't have time to take off from washing up embodies the normality of the lottery, obviously invested in its practice yet not so avid for its payoff that the viewer is encouraged to wait for it to boomerang onto her. Neither Jackson nor Yust offer such reassurances. She accepted what was handed down to her, as literally as we imagine she was once given, like her tow-headed son, too young to do more than cling to it, a child-sized stone. Afterward she would clean her hands on her apron and finish the dishes, smiling faintly as if she had watched a parade pass by. The instant it's a Hutchinson instead of a Martin, Dunbar, Adams in the crosshairs of that bone-pale annual pile, she's interrupting, rules-lawyering, demanding a do-over, defiantly and then frantically resisting the inevitable consequence of a few strokes of graphite on blue-lined paper, the storm-hail of stones against a corrugated blue shed. Here or anywhere else, it always happens to somebody else until it doesn't. "It isn't fair. It isn't fair, it isn't right!" The credits come up over the same wide shot of the field, rain-puddled, the mobbed crowd of people in one corner like the year's store of stones. The one thing the film loses by sticking so strictly to Jackson's dialogue is the stronger sense of the lottery as the dwindled vestige of something much older and much more involved, the chant, the procession, the salute so vaguely recollected that their performance has fallen away from the ritual whose virtue persists without them, if indeed it has any virtue beyond mortaring the community's sense of self with blood, which has sufficed as far back as the walls of Rome, the cities of Cain. I suspect it of being an accident of filming in a couple of small towns in southern California in 1969, but the cast is conspicuously white: the least WASPy name on the roll is Zanini. Of course. Everyone's in-group until somebody needs to be out.
It is not inconceivable that I could have encountered this film in its intended environment of middle or high school. I can remember different English classes screening To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Shane (1953), Of Mice and Men (1992), Romeo and Juliet (1968), even a scene from what it took me almost a quarter of a century to determine had been A Tale of Two Cities (1958), since at the time I registered mostly that it did not contain Ronald Colman and was therefore inauthentic. I had no idea of its educational existence until this spring, when it handily turned up on the Internet Archive. It seemed appropriate to wait to watch it in season, which I can only hope does not contagiously throw the viewer's hat into the ring. Perhaps it doesn't need to. We don't live in a different country from Shirley Jackson, setting her ritual tacitly in her own home town. "It ain't the way it used to be. People ain't the way they used to be." I don't know, Old Man Warner. Stones, blood, corn, who's in and who's out, sometimes it feels like the cars and the clothes are the only things that change. Attagirl, Tessie, indeed. This duty brought to you by my prescribed backers at Patreon.
no subject
Perfect. Terrifying.
no subject
Thank you.
no subject
That story rewrote my brain -- it introduced me to several concepts you mention here and made me understand several more such as scapegoating indeed.
no subject
I have stories and books like that. I think it's wonderful that "The Lottery" was one for you. How did you find it?
no subject
A revelation. I was astonished that they'd do that and then it clicked as makign perfect sense for humans to do. Especially the timeworn edges -- no one knows the mechanism anymore, they just know that if they don't enact a ritual sacrifice that Life Will Fail. That made perfect literary sense as well.
I think I looked up the author to write a fan letter and was annoyd to find out she was dead. :D
no subject
I am afraid I was just asking how you ran across the story, but I love your answer so much I'm glad I phrased my question unclearly.
I bet Shirley Jackson would have appreciated your fan letter even after the fact.
no subject
Ahahahah I was the kind of kid who took English class seriously. Akaka a neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerd. My 11th grade English teacher would probably be pleased to know I still remember The Lottery, or was that 9th grade? Adnd I hope Ms. JAckson would be pleased Americans like her story so much they choose to inflict it on their schoolchildren. :D
no subject
Sadly, the graphic novel version adapted by her grandson was awful.
no subject
Thank you! I hope you enjoy it! It invents very little, which can make for an airless adaptation, but here felt like the adapter had gotten the point. If it expanded more, I'd trust it less. (And most of what it invents is stuff covered in indirect speech by Jackson, e.g. "the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery," which needs to be put into words for a dramatization no matter what.)
Sadly, the graphic novel version adapted by her grandson was awful.
I am sorry to hear that. I saw that it existed, but have not encountered it myself.
no subject
no subject
Thank you!
I didn't know about this film until a few years ago, when some friends in my age group mentioned seeing it in school.
That's so neat! I am happy to hear evidence of it in the wild and hope it was not traumatizing. That's probably not a realistic hope.
Shirley Jackson's The Witchcraft of Salem Village was one of my most beloved childhood books (which I checked out again and again from the Sherman Oaks Public Library), but I didn't make the connection between it and Jackson's fiction until much later.
I read that one too! And do not believe I made the connection at the time, either, because I read a lot of nonfiction in elementary school without taking much note of who wrote it unless it was Gerald Durrell or the D'Aulaires. Just now I had to look up that Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols (1972) was written by Edna Barth even though I could picture the illustrations. But I never forget that Bradbury wrote The Halloween Tree (1972).
I don't know why I read Jackson's short fiction growing up and not her novels until I was in college when I picked up and fell in love with We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). The short stories were around the house, including randomly in sf anthologies of which my parents had a ton. I still haven't even read all her novels, although I did read Let Me Tell You (2015) once my mother had had it first.
no subject
Shirley Jackson. Wrote.
OMG the lightbulb that just went on in this room.
no subject
no subject
What was the story/history of you and The Daemon Lover? (Another story I haven't read.)
no subject
I am so glad I did not oversell the film to you. I was really impressed by it: it seems to be the best remembered of the Short-Story Showcase and I can see why.
What was the story/history of you and The Daemon Lover? (Another story I haven't read.)
"The Daemon Lover" is a retelling of the Child ballad of the same name, drawing especially on the part where the lover is known in some versions as James Harris—the name of the male figure who winds through the collection originally subtitled The Adventures of James Harris, never overtly supernatural, but always disruptive, inexorable, uncanny. He appears in the ballad as a woman's long-lost love, persuading her away from husband and child to take ship with him to the flowery banks of Italy, only for her to discover mid-sea that their true destination is the dark hills of Hell. Nearly every version ends with the sinking of the ship. Jackson strips down her story down to the core idea of a woman expecting something wonderful when she marries for headlong love and finding herself thrust instead into a hell of disappointment which could be an ordinary jilting except for consistently odd notes like her inability to recall clearly the face or voice of her never-seen Jamie Harris or her unfinished allusion to the strangeness of the circumstances under which they met or the ever more desperate and disorienting ways in which her quest just to locate the tall young man in a blue suit who was supposed to pick her up at ten o'clock that morning runs her into a nightmare of all the minute and awful wounds of being a woman thirty-four years old and invisible and lonely that she thought she would escape with the marriage to Jamie, finally loved by someone. So obviously her pain upset me, and the way no one seems to take her seriously even in clear distress, and the way the story leaves her still suspended in the spell of being unable to let him go, but what it turns out really upset me, which I wouldn't be able to pin down until I had had some experience with genre protocols, is the way that no interpretation of the story can make it better. It is not more comforting to imagine she was conned by a demon instead of a normally faithless man, but to decide in the face of the all the little twinges of weirdness that there is an entirely rational explanation for his disappearance still leaves her enthralled, abandoned, her sense of self sapped as thoroughly as if an incubus really had battened on her. Resolving the ambiguity wouldn't make a difference. It's just bad either way. I am not sure I had encountered that kind of ambivalently hopeless horror before Jackson, or if I had, it hadn't whammied me the same way, and even though more than one story in the collection actually operates in this plausible-deniable mode, "The Daemon Lover" stuck with me. Like a lot of things which scared or upset me when younger, it is now a technique I really admire and even often prefer—if you want to bounce me out of a piece of horror or weird fiction, just punt all your ambiguity in the third act—but I still find this particular story upsetting and imagine I always will.
no subject
I can see why it upset you. In the ballad (well, at least "The House Carpenter" version), she's tempted by offerings of riches and ease, and she abandons her children, facts which prepare you for the bad turn that comes. Whereas it sounds like Jackson gives her a deeply sympathetic treatment--and then still leaves her stranded and suffering. Very real, very distressing.
no subject
It's shivery! I should have remembered that you knew the ballad. I would have heard it first as "The House Carpenter," too, although I don't know whose version. Either Joan Baez or Richard Dyer-Bennet. We had records of them both.
Whereas it sounds like Jackson gives her a deeply sympathetic treatment--and then still leaves her stranded and suffering. Very real, very distressing.
Yes. She does nothing to deserve what happens to her. Which may be one of Jackson's themes.