Jackson "The Lottery"

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

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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.