On a warm and sunny June morning, the town’s residents gather in the quiet main square. They have gathered to perform an ancient ritual, the meaning of which has been lost to time. One by one, they remove strips of paper from an old wooden box.
If you went to school in America around 1950, you probably know how this story ends (and if not, prepare for a 75-year-old spoiler): the person who pulls out a piece of paper with a black dot on it is stoned by all his neighbors.
“The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson’s short story that first appeared in The New Yorker magazine in the June 26, 1948, issue, is now so familiar as a cultural touchstone that it may be surprising to learn how shocking it seemed. originally.
The story went viral, the way a short story could back then. Pairs read it together and discussed its meaning. More than 150 letters flooded the offices of The New Yorker, more mail than the magazine had ever received for a work of fiction.
Readers called the story “outrageous,” “appalling,” and “absolutely pointless”; some canceled their subscriptions. I spoke to one of those readers more than a decade ago and he still remembered, some 60 years later, how much discomfort the story had caused him.
When “The Lottery” was published three years after the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, many readers speculated that, given its apparent themes of conformity and cruelty, it was an allegory for the Holocaust, or the fear of the Holocaust. communism in the United States in the 1950s incited by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Over the years, it has become a trusted reference when discussing any troubling social development or trend. People have heard it echoed recently in the policies of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again populism or in the perceived excesses of the censorship mob. In Harper’s Magazine, critic Thomas Chatterton Williams used it as a metaphor for cancel culture, which he suggested was a contemporary analogue of stoning.
But reading “The Lottery” as a political commentary misses the main source of the story’s power: its ambiguity. Jackson deliberately refused to give a tidy ending to his readers, some of whom questioned whether The New Yorker had accidentally omitted a final explanatory paragraph.
That’s why it has retained its relevance over the decades: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its disturbing open ending.
The story works as a mirror to reflect to its readers their current concerns, which is why they could see McCarthy in it 75 years ago and Trump today.
That quality is also what makes reading “The Lottery” for the first time so disturbing—reminding us of the vital service that literature can perform when we allow it to disturb us. Today readers across the political spectrum seem to be losing their appetite for literary discomfort. Far-right activists have been successful in banning books from libraries and school curricula that contradict conservative mores, particularly those with LGBTQ themes — a drastic step that threatens freedom of thought. More liberal readers have also shown a reluctance to tolerate fiction that hits at their political sensibilities — especially in the world of young adult fiction, where several high-profile writers have canceled or delayed books that tackle controversial issues.
It’s true that what reads as discomfort to one person can feel like aggression to another. Still, the idea that authors should work to offend no one is a recipe for bad writing.
If we see intellectual dissonance as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity for discussion, our cultural climate suffers.
The lack of an easily digestible message is why a short story caused outrage among readers when it first appeared — but it’s also why we’re still talking and thinking about it 75 years later.
I was reminded of that quality again in 2017 thanks to a different story in The New Yorker. Just as the #MeToo movement was kicking off, “Cat Person,” a short story by Kristen Roupenian, went viral for very similar reasons. The story is the account of a relationship carried on mainly via text messages that culminates in a bad date followed by worse sex, ending, like “The Lottery”, with a bombshell that readers must process and interpret for themselves.
“People get angry when they can’t understand the meaning of something,” Roupenian told me. “But the discomfort is the meaning.”
Great writing can entertain, enlighten, and even empower, but one of its greatest gifts to us is its ability to unsettle us, prompting us to seek our own moral to the story.
“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea that we carry within,” Kafka once wrote. Stories like “The Lottery” create waves in that frozen sea.
We censor them at our own risk.
By: INTELLIGENCE/Ruth Franklin
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6785004, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-30 15:50:08
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