Each month, The New Yorker podcasts one writer reading and discussing a short story by another writer (go to http://www.newyorker.com/online/podcasts/fiction). Recently, the story they featured was Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"--one of those stories that has been around so long that it almost seems have been written out of the need for High School and freshman comp classes to have something to discuss.
While listening to the ending again, I suddenly thought of various SF stories too mediocre to be remembered which turn on the same switcheroo in which a central character is suddenly revealed to be a sacrificial lamb. I guess that's why "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas" by LeGuin stands out--by reversing what must have become a depressingly familiar dynamic.
A. M. Homes presents a nice appreciation of the artistry of the story (pointing out that it begins with a vivid splash of colors and ends with a black dot), but tells of getting angry reading of Marxist interpretations of the story.
Angry? Why, I wonder? I've often been angry with dismissal's of fiction I thought were ill-founded, but why get angry because a Marxist took a shot at interpreting the story?
It so happens that a month before they posted that interview, I'd written a lengthy attempt at a Marxist interpretation of the story. It was actually an email, to a friend who was going to be teaching the story (in freshman Comp, I assume.) She asked if I had come across any Marxist interpretations of it.
While writing it, It occurred to me how easy life would be if there were a Limbaugh school of criticism. Then all you’d have to say is that "The Lottery" is an allegory for how excessive taxation destroys the average Jill. There is no such school, as far as I know, but maybe Stanley Fish will invent one, to prove, once and for all, before he goes the way of all Fishes, that nobody in the world has any idea what the hell Stanley Fish means, or why
***
A Marxist approach to "The Lottery"? Surprisingly, "The Lottery" receives very little critical consideration (compared to, say, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"); I wonder if it's because as a writer of surprise endings ("The Lottery" "Charles") she suffers in by comparison to O'Connor? Dunno. Anyhow, I found reference to a 1985 article in the New Orleans Review, but I couldn't find it on JSTOR, so I don't know what the article says.
Still it's an interesting thought.
It's clearly not a Marxist utopia story, in that it's not a critique of the evils of capital from the perspective of the working man. The working men come off no better than the middle class. Bakhtin is more overtly pertinent, in that the Lottery itself is a carnival world, in which Mr. Summers becomes King for a Day. In this world anybody in the town is likely to be brought down into the earth. (In Bakhtin’s utopian carnival, this becomes the place of privilege; historians have pointed out that this is not exactly how it worked in real life, in that people destroyed during the carnival season often just died. Bakhtin calls the dark side the Romantic carnival, the carnival without hope.)
But there are some elements which a Marxist would focus on. The man who runs the carnival each year is the coal merchant, Summers. Notwithstanding the 21st century connection between the burning of coal and endless summers, a 1940's post-war connection between the two would note that burning coal warms us (like the summer), and, more importantly, both are associated with an optimistic promise of ongoing, energetic growth; from an economic perspective coal=industry, as within the story summer=lottery=corn=agriculture. So there is rough sense in which the story is an allegory of the absolute need of capital to, Vampire like, feed on the blood of the worker; this is a rough paraphrase of a comment by Marx about capital, but the worker who is fed upon here is more or less randomly chosen, NOT chosen by dint of lack of access to capital (as Marx would have it).
Let’s push this further.
The world of "The Lottery" is not exactly a feudal, pre-modern world, despite the references to agriculture, and its not quite a world of modern capitalism. If anything, it resembles an 18th century "emergence of the public sphere" world; the lottery is a civic gathering, decisions are made in a very orderly way. It’s a rationalized carnival, a carnival equipped with the trappings of a modern, enlightenment sensibility which serves to preserve a pre-modern ritual.
Lotteries, I keep hearing, were popular in the 18th century, and favored by the founding fathers; a quick peek at Wikipedia (btw, I do have real work to do today, but I’m on a roll) tells me that Liz 1 started lottery in the late 1500's, and that the English State Lottery was a regular feature from 1694 to 1826, and they were used to raise capital by the state, and that the broker system they developed evolved into a system of stock brokers. Here’s what this adds up to for me: the lottery was a tool for expanding hegemonic rule. That is almost precisely the role it plays in the story. The lottery in the story is a tool for maintaining hegemonic rule. People don’t want to change it or stop it because they’ve always done it, and because they’ve always done it, they don’t want to change it. The corn always grew after every other lottery; why stop now?
And it’s a patriarchal order they are preserving. The lottery is presided over by a man, and each male head of household draws. Regardless of the fact that the victim is as likely to be male as female (I once tried to work this out mathematically, to see if this were so; lets assume it is), the patriarchal order is preserved; it doesn’t matter who dies, so long as they submit to the patriarchy. I’m not confused by the red herring of Mrs. Hutchinson being the victim; she’s not Anne Hutchinson, except that she like Anne H. is sacrificed on the altar of patriarchy.
A Marxist account of elections in late industrial capitalism is that elections are recurring plebiscites in which the worker, through the act of voting, submits to the prevailing hegemony, ruled more by capital than by elected officials ( it’s Habermas I’m paraphrasing). The Lottery works sort of like that.
But here’s my most interesting thought, which popped into my mind when the radio came on this morning at 6:20 to reports of the worldwide financial crisis spreading.
Money, Marx tells us, is the ability to be what I am not. With money, I can appear smarter, more talented, better looking than I am; he says something to the effect that I may be ugly, but with money I can buy attention (not to mention better clothes); who then is to say I am not good looking?
A lottery is the promise of unearned wealth. I buy a ticket on the hope that chance will make me into what I have not earned or inherited. This lottery is the exact inverse of that. I participate not willingly but because it is my civic duty, and in this lottery everybody–almost everybody–becomes a capitalist for a day. "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire like, lives on the labor of the of the living," Marx tells us (Google) (actually its from Capital). He goes on to say that the vampire will not release the living until he has sucked out every drop of blood, every ounce of marrow. I get to participate in another’s destruction not because her actions have merited punishment but precisely because her death ensures my continued prosperity. The polity becomes the vampire.
If you’ve read Jackson's essay about how she wrote the story ("Biography of a Story"), you may see why I think this perspective probably does summarize how she felt. She also has an essay about working at Macy’s (?) for one day in which she pretty much portrays herself as the hapless victim of society, forced to participate in her own destruction.
What’s notable about "The Lottery" is the extent to it doesn’t identity with the victim. If at the end, Mrs. H. were pleading for life, the story would be unendurable. Instead she’s claiming the process wasn’t fair (ie., this should happen, but not to me) so we don’t really identify with her; we see her as spectacle, as other.
I’m sure your students will be entertained by a tour through Habermas, Bakhtin, and Marx.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Hamlet 2
While watching the DVD of Hamlet 2 last night (Netflix), I thought, It's a good thing I don't own this, or I'd waste time everyday rewatching "Rock Me Sexy, Jesus."
Then I watched that song (in the sing along special feature) and thought, no, I probably wouldn't. Twice is enough. The choral arrangement of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," on the other hand, holds up pretty well (I listened to that)
I give them credit for making the absurd connection between Jesus and Hamlet (special son, doomed son; absent father, overbearing father) and making it work.
Then I watched that song (in the sing along special feature) and thought, no, I probably wouldn't. Twice is enough. The choral arrangement of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," on the other hand, holds up pretty well (I listened to that)
I give them credit for making the absurd connection between Jesus and Hamlet (special son, doomed son; absent father, overbearing father) and making it work.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Dickens Revisited?
'It was the worst of times. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of Darkness. It was the winter of despair. We had nothing before us; we were all going direct the Other Way - in short, the period was the present period.'
--It's interesting that even printed this way, a sense of ironic detachment still comes through
--It's interesting that even printed this way, a sense of ironic detachment still comes through
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Dewey Readmore Books
About halfway through the book Dewey by the librarian Vicki Myron, I wondered how much Marge Piercy, that depression born daughter of the tough realities of the American midwest, she had read. It seemed to me she probably had some, probably more than I have. If not, she’s got something to look forward to, and maybe one or two more books to write.
The reason I thought of Marge Piercy was what struck me as the major sub theme of the book, the working lives of women. Mainly of course there’s her life, as the librarian of a small town in Iowa. But there’s also the life of her fellow workers in the library (where is it written that most workers in most libraries should be female? But it seems to be so), and the life of her mother.
Mostly though, I was grateful about the way she found to tell the story of her cat. Anyone can tell cute stories about a favorite pet, and enough people do. I’ve read or two of most cat related mysteries and enjoyed the experience the way last month and two years ago I enjoyed eating at McDonald’s for dinner. Dewey is not that kind of meal.
The author of Dewey "had" me when she began talking about attending Al-Anon meetings to recover from an alcoholic marriage long before Dewey showed up at her library (although this portion is told as a flashback). This assured me that she had a story that that had something to do with life as I've known it.
It helps that I’m married to a woman who once ran a small library, and that in every town I’ve ever lived in (most of them towns of less than 20,000), the local library has been a focal point of my sanity, and the local librarians have been that curious mixture of provincialism and cosmopolitanism that librarians and English teachers are. If there is a mold here, Vicki Myron fits it.
She’s an activist librarian. The librarians I’ve known have all had a sense of mission. None of have thought that they were going to save their community through their library, but several have definitely made it a point to provide the resources to community members that would make a difference in their life, and that’s the type of librarian Myron is.
The cat, Dewey, gives her is a thread to tell her story to make a rambling 25 year career more or less coherent. More importantly, her relationship with Deewy provides a metonymic figure of how human lives and animal companion lives are intertwined. To be sure, she saved Dewey’s life. He did no save hers, and it would be overstating it to say he made it meaningful; but he did give her a story, which in turn allows her to tell the story of her career–always a welcome challenge–and of her brothers’ and mother’s deaths.
3/4 of the way through the book, she assures the reader that Dewey is not a substitute son. Nonetheless, she frequently refers to herself as his mother–so is she saying he thought of me as a mom, but I thought of him as a pet?
Vocabulary breaks down. What he is her male offspring/companion.
Early in the novel, she tells of Dewey being found in a frozen library drop box, one so cold his paws are frozen to the bottom. She rescues him and washes him off; do I detect some birth imagery here? Later we find that she herself was the victim (there’s no other word) of an unauthorized radical hysterectomy. Is it entirely wrong to see this icey box as an image of her own womb?
This does not belittle her in the least. Rather, I’m trying to make a point about the cyborgian nature of human/animal relation. Anyone who has washed, fed, slept with, and disciplined an animal knows that animal companions both are and are not similar to children, just as they are similar to a spouse, a girl/boyfriend, and a nurse. They are not any of these things, but "pets" and these relations are embarassingly similar, and disarmingly intimate. We belittle them (and ourselves) if we only talk of them of them in an "aw, cute!" way (which by the way is why is why I thought of Marge Piercy, and not Anne Tyler; Tyler, though a better writer than either of the other two, is also more fundamentally comic, if not necessarily sweeter). People who live with dogs and cats know that these companions will help you survive some of the worst experiences of your life, and so it is when Myron talks of fights with her daughter, of her own illnesses, and the deaths of close family. We also know that these animals–not all of whom are as well mannered as Dewey–will bring us some real pain and heartache
Follow Up (Jan 4)
The day after I posted this, The Times and Democrat ran an article about the Vicki Myron adopting another kitten: The original article was published here.
Also, I heard of a book, Animals Make Us Human, which is about some of the things issues about inter species relations. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review:
Grandin, . . . the autistic author assesses dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife and zoo animals based on a core emotion system she believes animals and humans share, including a need to seek; a sense of rage, fear, and panic; feelings of lust; an urge to nurture; and an ability to play. Among observations at odds with conventional wisdom: dogs need human parents, not alpha pack leaders, and cats respond to training.
Dogs and cats don't thing of us as dogs and cats, anymore --or, I suspect, less--than we think of them in people terms.
The reason I thought of Marge Piercy was what struck me as the major sub theme of the book, the working lives of women. Mainly of course there’s her life, as the librarian of a small town in Iowa. But there’s also the life of her fellow workers in the library (where is it written that most workers in most libraries should be female? But it seems to be so), and the life of her mother.
Mostly though, I was grateful about the way she found to tell the story of her cat. Anyone can tell cute stories about a favorite pet, and enough people do. I’ve read or two of most cat related mysteries and enjoyed the experience the way last month and two years ago I enjoyed eating at McDonald’s for dinner. Dewey is not that kind of meal.
The author of Dewey "had" me when she began talking about attending Al-Anon meetings to recover from an alcoholic marriage long before Dewey showed up at her library (although this portion is told as a flashback). This assured me that she had a story that that had something to do with life as I've known it.
It helps that I’m married to a woman who once ran a small library, and that in every town I’ve ever lived in (most of them towns of less than 20,000), the local library has been a focal point of my sanity, and the local librarians have been that curious mixture of provincialism and cosmopolitanism that librarians and English teachers are. If there is a mold here, Vicki Myron fits it.
She’s an activist librarian. The librarians I’ve known have all had a sense of mission. None of have thought that they were going to save their community through their library, but several have definitely made it a point to provide the resources to community members that would make a difference in their life, and that’s the type of librarian Myron is.
The cat, Dewey, gives her is a thread to tell her story to make a rambling 25 year career more or less coherent. More importantly, her relationship with Deewy provides a metonymic figure of how human lives and animal companion lives are intertwined. To be sure, she saved Dewey’s life. He did no save hers, and it would be overstating it to say he made it meaningful; but he did give her a story, which in turn allows her to tell the story of her career–always a welcome challenge–and of her brothers’ and mother’s deaths.
3/4 of the way through the book, she assures the reader that Dewey is not a substitute son. Nonetheless, she frequently refers to herself as his mother–so is she saying he thought of me as a mom, but I thought of him as a pet?
Vocabulary breaks down. What he is her male offspring/companion.
Early in the novel, she tells of Dewey being found in a frozen library drop box, one so cold his paws are frozen to the bottom. She rescues him and washes him off; do I detect some birth imagery here? Later we find that she herself was the victim (there’s no other word) of an unauthorized radical hysterectomy. Is it entirely wrong to see this icey box as an image of her own womb?
This does not belittle her in the least. Rather, I’m trying to make a point about the cyborgian nature of human/animal relation. Anyone who has washed, fed, slept with, and disciplined an animal knows that animal companions both are and are not similar to children, just as they are similar to a spouse, a girl/boyfriend, and a nurse. They are not any of these things, but "pets" and these relations are embarassingly similar, and disarmingly intimate. We belittle them (and ourselves) if we only talk of them of them in an "aw, cute!" way (which by the way is why is why I thought of Marge Piercy, and not Anne Tyler; Tyler, though a better writer than either of the other two, is also more fundamentally comic, if not necessarily sweeter). People who live with dogs and cats know that these companions will help you survive some of the worst experiences of your life, and so it is when Myron talks of fights with her daughter, of her own illnesses, and the deaths of close family. We also know that these animals–not all of whom are as well mannered as Dewey–will bring us some real pain and heartache
Follow Up (Jan 4)
The day after I posted this, The Times and Democrat ran an article about the Vicki Myron adopting another kitten: The original article was published here.
Also, I heard of a book, Animals Make Us Human, which is about some of the things issues about inter species relations. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review:
Grandin, . . . the autistic author assesses dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, poultry, wildlife and zoo animals based on a core emotion system she believes animals and humans share, including a need to seek; a sense of rage, fear, and panic; feelings of lust; an urge to nurture; and an ability to play. Among observations at odds with conventional wisdom: dogs need human parents, not alpha pack leaders, and cats respond to training.
Dogs and cats don't thing of us as dogs and cats, anymore --or, I suspect, less--than we think of them in people terms.
One of Best of 2008?
The most interesting piece of filmcraft in The Dark Knight, which I recently saw on DVD, is the final shot of Keith Ledger as The Joker hanging upside; the picture swivels in the frame until he seems to be upright. His hair and other objects in the frame continue to fall "down," which is now "up" to the viewer, but Ledger himself is confident, poised; the Joker is using that poise, that non-chalance to taunt The Batman, because he knows he’s won. If the Batman kills him, he’s broken the Batman. If he doesn’t, this cat and mouse game will go on, which must be what the Batman really wants; the crime fighter shows, through his actions if not his words that he wants the criminal to continue.
It’s a simple trick of deconstruction. When you find a pair of binary oppositions which define themselves against each other (God, Satan; Good, Evil; Democrats, Republicans), you can usually make an interesting claim that A, which tries to crush or at least marginalize B, in fact defines itself by B, and so NEEDS B. (This also works with x and y). It’s a legitimate trick, one that’s been around for a while, but which deconstruction (and feminism and post-colonialism) have used over and over, sometimes more productively than at others. To some extent, a manufactures b; constant dieting leads to being overweight; an obsessive compulsive with neatness creates a chaotic life. In Dark Knight, the world of crime has turned to the Joker to be their hero to counter the heroics of Batman itself.
This convergence of opposites has always been part of the Batman story. However often the story gets rewritten, it always begins with Bruce Wayne as an orphaned rich boy whose parents were killed in a senseless robbery, "good" being birthed as the spawn of "evil." But this champion of capital and the superego has always associated himself with the id, with his underground lair and his horned mask, whose "ears" do not look anything like bat ears. (Why does he fashion himself after the most timid of predators, one known for avoiding trouble by wrapping itself up in its arms and hiding? According to the two page origin story that appeared about 6 months after Batman’s first appearance, Bruce Wayne adopted the bat persona because criminals are superstitious. I always assumed that this 1939 character was inspired by the 1931 adaptation of "Dracula"; according to my crack research team, aka Wikipedia, Batman’s creators say they were inspired by a 1930 haunted house movie called something like "The Bat Whispers." Okay, fine, but why were They inspired by a timid, flying mouse-like creature that eats mosquitoes? If only THEY had had access to Wikipedia, they might have named their movie after something truly scary, like unemployment, or Economic Deflation. "Unemployment Whispers!" "Deflation-Man"! Damn, that’d have been scary).
Back to this movie.
I was not surprised to see this superhero flick turn up on so many best of 2008 lists. Rarely has a movie been so tuned in to the zeitgeist. This Batman is America in the George Bush era. How did we end up creating evil when from the start we were focused on destroying it? To be blunt, The Joker is terrorism, and Batman is the war on terror. In Batman Begins, Chritian Bale’s Batman hung a character upside down to scare a response out of him; torture works (and I don't believed "hanged" would have been the right word, because the man is question is not hanged by the neck, but what do I know?). In The Dark Knight, this certainly works to get a response out of The Joker, but so what? Throughout the movie, The Joker consistently gives different answers to the question of how he got his scars (a question no one asks), but answers, it turns out, are not answers.
Thus the ending, in which Batman riding off on a motorcyle invites the world to blame him for everything that has gone wrong (I’ve skipped over the whole 2-Face / Harvey Dent subplot, so let me simply say that this neatly reflects the moral ambiguity developed elsewhere). Do we see a slight hint of America in Iraq?
I hope this is the end of the Batman film franchise for a few years. It takes a fair amount of showmanship to mix aesthetic figures of the failures of the American war on "terror" with really good motorcyle chases, but its the type 0f thing that can only be done once. After that, what you'll be left with is the motorcycle chase, which will certainly be twice as stimulating, but probably less than half as interesting.
It’s a simple trick of deconstruction. When you find a pair of binary oppositions which define themselves against each other (God, Satan; Good, Evil; Democrats, Republicans), you can usually make an interesting claim that A, which tries to crush or at least marginalize B, in fact defines itself by B, and so NEEDS B. (This also works with x and y). It’s a legitimate trick, one that’s been around for a while, but which deconstruction (and feminism and post-colonialism) have used over and over, sometimes more productively than at others. To some extent, a manufactures b; constant dieting leads to being overweight; an obsessive compulsive with neatness creates a chaotic life. In Dark Knight, the world of crime has turned to the Joker to be their hero to counter the heroics of Batman itself.
This convergence of opposites has always been part of the Batman story. However often the story gets rewritten, it always begins with Bruce Wayne as an orphaned rich boy whose parents were killed in a senseless robbery, "good" being birthed as the spawn of "evil." But this champion of capital and the superego has always associated himself with the id, with his underground lair and his horned mask, whose "ears" do not look anything like bat ears. (Why does he fashion himself after the most timid of predators, one known for avoiding trouble by wrapping itself up in its arms and hiding? According to the two page origin story that appeared about 6 months after Batman’s first appearance, Bruce Wayne adopted the bat persona because criminals are superstitious. I always assumed that this 1939 character was inspired by the 1931 adaptation of "Dracula"; according to my crack research team, aka Wikipedia, Batman’s creators say they were inspired by a 1930 haunted house movie called something like "The Bat Whispers." Okay, fine, but why were They inspired by a timid, flying mouse-like creature that eats mosquitoes? If only THEY had had access to Wikipedia, they might have named their movie after something truly scary, like unemployment, or Economic Deflation. "Unemployment Whispers!" "Deflation-Man"! Damn, that’d have been scary).
Back to this movie.
I was not surprised to see this superhero flick turn up on so many best of 2008 lists. Rarely has a movie been so tuned in to the zeitgeist. This Batman is America in the George Bush era. How did we end up creating evil when from the start we were focused on destroying it? To be blunt, The Joker is terrorism, and Batman is the war on terror. In Batman Begins, Chritian Bale’s Batman hung a character upside down to scare a response out of him; torture works (and I don't believed "hanged" would have been the right word, because the man is question is not hanged by the neck, but what do I know?). In The Dark Knight, this certainly works to get a response out of The Joker, but so what? Throughout the movie, The Joker consistently gives different answers to the question of how he got his scars (a question no one asks), but answers, it turns out, are not answers.
Thus the ending, in which Batman riding off on a motorcyle invites the world to blame him for everything that has gone wrong (I’ve skipped over the whole 2-Face / Harvey Dent subplot, so let me simply say that this neatly reflects the moral ambiguity developed elsewhere). Do we see a slight hint of America in Iraq?
I hope this is the end of the Batman film franchise for a few years. It takes a fair amount of showmanship to mix aesthetic figures of the failures of the American war on "terror" with really good motorcyle chases, but its the type 0f thing that can only be done once. After that, what you'll be left with is the motorcycle chase, which will certainly be twice as stimulating, but probably less than half as interesting.
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