Shirley
Jackson was born in San Francisco, California, in 1916, and spent her childhood
in Burlingame, California, when she began writing poetry and short stories as a
young teenager. Her family moved east when she was seventeen, and she attended
the University of Rochester, New York.
She
entered Syracuse University, N.Y., in 1937, where she met her future husband,
the young aspiring literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. Both graduated in 1940
and moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where Shirley wrote without fail
every day. She began having her stories published in The New Republic and The New
Yorker.
In
1945 her husband was offered a teaching position at Bennington College, and
they moved into an old house in North Bennington, Vermont, where Shirley
continued her daily writing while raising children and running the house.
Her
first novel The Road Through the Wall
was published in1948, the same year that The
New Yorker published her iconic story The
Lottery.
She
composed six novels, including The
Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, two memoirs and more than 200 short stories.
She
was a heavy smoker and suffered numerous health problems. In 1965, Shirley died
in her sleep at her home in North Bennington, at the age of 48.
THE LOTTERY
It
is a short story by Shirley Jackson published in the magazine The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. Reaction
to the post from readers was negative, who sent protest messages to the magazine,
but later it was accepted as a classic short story subject to interpretations.
Now it’s considered as “one of the most famous short stories in the history of
American literature”. It has been adapted for radio, theatre and television.
Argument:
The
lottery takes place on a beautiful summer day, June 27, in a small town of 300
inhabitants, where all residents gather for a traditional annual lottery.
Although
the event seems festive at first, people show a strange and gloomy mood, and it
soon becomes clear that no one wants to win the lottery.
The
draw is carried out between the heads of the family. The Hutchinsons are chosen
and then the draw is made within the chosen family, getting chosen Tessie (the
mother), so she is stoned to death by all the neighbours of the town, including
his own family. This is a sacrifice to ensure a good harvest, according to the
beliefs of the community.
I
think that this is a story about the human capacity for violence. It explores
ideas such as communal violence, individual vulnerability and the dangers of
blindly following traditions.
We rely on collective
violence in those circumstances that we would not be able to consider
individually.
ISSUES
The
quid of the story is that the people seem normal, nice and even happy, and they
go to the square as they would go to the market, with an informal attitude,
they chatter and gossip; even the day is sunny, the children don’t have school because
they start the summer holidays and the procedures of the lottery are simple and
common. So the jewel of the story is the ending; we don’t imagine that something
horrifying is going to happen. The villagers aren’t afraid, although we suspect
that something surprising can happen, because there’s too much happiness, and
we have had some hints, e.g., they collect stones, there is somebody missing, Mrs
Hutchington says “it isn’t fair”, etc. So in this case we have a story that loses
all its effect when we know the end; the story has a punch, but as soon as we
know that it’s going to hit us at the end, we are alert and don’t get hurt (symbolically)
any more. A similar classical and very famous story of this kind is Monkey’s
Paw, by W.W. Jacobs. I strongly recommend its reading if you like these
kind of stories: it’s short and easy to read with a lot of dialogue. 👉So,
what kind of stories do you prefer: the ones with a clear ending or the ones
without?
I
think the main topic of the story is tradition, what we do with tradition.
According to the dictionary “tradition is a custom or way of behaving that has
continued for a long time in a group of people”, but, for me, another
definition is also possible: tradition is what you do because someone before
you did, not because it’s reasonable to do. So you don’t think about the action
and its consequences, you don’t think about the reason why. Accordingly,
tradition is opposite to progress.What
is your point of view about traditions? Do you remember the tradition in Julian
Barnes’s story, that one about sleeping on a mattress in a barn on the wedding
night? And I particularly remember the tradition of burying the mother’s
placenta when there is a birth (as someone in my family told me). 👉Can
you tell us a very unreasonable tradition you know?
The
pen is mightier than the sword. What
doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but
words will never hurt me. You
are what you eat. A
watched pot never boils. The
grass is always greener on the other side. Time
heals all wounds. An
apple a day keeps the doctor away. Slow
and steady wins the race. You
catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Out
of sight, out of mind. Early
to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Love
is blind. You
can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
...
In
the story, the tradition has lost some parts of the ritual, or some things have
been changed, e.g., using papers instead of pieces of wood for the draw. Do
you think that this is because traditions tend to keep the essential parts and
forget the less important ones? 👉What
is your opinion about rituals? Are they necessary for our everyday lives? And are they useful for ceremonies, social situations as a wedding or a funeral?
The
story is situated in a small village of 300 inhabitants. The
smaller the society the stronger and less sound are the traditions? 👉What
is your view on this?
Mrs
Hutchington says “it isn’t fair”. Why? Because she thinks something in the
procedure wasn’t correct, or because she knows she’s going to be stoned? 👉In
which societies they did lapidation and in which countries they're still doing now?
So
being lucky is another important theme in our narration. There’s a wonderful
story about the fortune (in the
classical or Greek sense) or the destiny ruling our lives: La
loteria en Babilonia by Jorge Luis Borges. In the Æneid, they say: Fortune
helps audacious people, that is, “chance is something you don’t have: that’s
something you must look for”. Or: you cannot wait your chance sitting down, you
have to stand up and go for it. 👉In
your opinion, do our lives depend most on luck or most on our personal
decisions?
Another
topic you can find in The Lottery is the
question of the scapegoat; that means
that, when there are catastrophes or phenomena you aren’t able to explain, you
attribute them to some sin or bad action someone has done, and so this person has to pay for it, and, if you don’t know the guilty one, you’ll have to choose
someone (using a lottery, e.g.) to pay for it. That will stop new disasters. Religion explains
this as a sacrifice: you have to do a sacrifice to soothe the gods, and that
means killing an animal or a person. You already know the legend of Saint George and
the Dragon: every year they had to choose a maiden to feed the Dragon. 👉Can
you remember other examples of scapegoats?
BIOGRAPHY: Clarice
Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 as Chaya Pinkhasivna
Lispector in a Jewish family. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war.
Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled,
penniless, to the other side of the world. They fled first to Moldavia and
Romania and finally to Brazil in 1922, where they adapted their names to the
Portuguese. Since then, Chaya received the name Clarice. Her mother died when she was 10
years old. She continued her education and entered the Law School in Rio de
Janeiro, but she followed her dream in the newsrooms, where her beauty and her
brilliance made a dazzling impression. In 1940, she published her first novel
“The Triumph””. Three months later his father died at 55 years old. As a student she met her future
husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, whom she married in 1943 and whom
she accompanied to many different countries, and she didn't only leave her family
and country, but her job as a journalist in which she already had a reputation.
For 15 years Clarice led a boring life as a perfect wife, but she never stopped
writing and always missed Brazil. On her first trip to Europe, in
Naples in 1944, during the Second World War, she was a volunteer in the
infirmary assisting Brazilian soldiers. There she confessed “I don't really
know how to write travel letters, I really don't even know how to travel”. In 1946, she published her second
novel “O Lustre” before they settled in Bern where her first child Paulo was
born. Back to Rio de Janeiro in 1949 she
returned to her journalistic activity under the pseudonym of Tereza Quadros,
but in 1952 she left Brazil again moving with her husband to Washington D.C.,
where her second son Pedro was born. In 1954, she published the translation of
her book “Near to the wild heart” into French, with a cover by Henri Matisse. In 1959, she separated from her
husband and returned to Rio de Janeiro. There she resumed her journalistic
activity in order to get the necessary money to become independent. A year
after, she published “Lazos de familia”, which had some success, and the next
year “La manzana en la oscuridad”; in 1963 she published “The Passion according
G.H.”, which is considered her masterpiece. In 1966, the writer fell asleep with
a lit cigarette, which started a fire in her room and burned much of her body.
She spent months in hospital. Her right hand would never regain its mobility.
This had a big impact on his state of mind and caused frequent depressions. Clarice made many translations due
to her command of Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and Hebrew
and Yiddish with some fluency. The only translation into Spanish was “Historia
de los dos que soñaron” de Jorge LuĂs Borges in the Jornal do Brazil. Between the late sixties and the
early seventies she published children’s books, translations and adaptations of
foreign works, getting great recognition. She died in 1977, victim of ovarian
cancer in Rio de Janeiro, some months after the publication of her last novel
“La hora de la estrella”, at the age of 56.
STYLE: Clarice
developed a unique literary style marked by singularities and linguistic
innovations. She does not adopt the normative grammar standard, the sentences
are not made with coherent rigour, but with a chaotic syntactic structure.
Nevertheless, they are full of beauty and freshness of artistic expression. Her fiction focuses on the deepest
regions of the unconscious, she centres her work on the individual and her most
intimate afflictions, reproducing the thoughts of the characters. In this way
she tried to make the readers to analyse her works on their own. Therefore, the
common denominator of her texts is the idea of knowledge in itself. So, it is
the spontaneity of the representation of thought of the characters what
characterizes the chaos of such a literary mark. Currently, the work of Clarice
Lispector continues arousing interest, which leads her to be considered one of
the most widely read and recognized Latin-American authors in the world.
THE
SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD: This
story is part of a collection of thirteen short stories called “Family Ties”.
It was published in 1960 after the Lispector’s permanent return to Brazil from
the United States. This short story begins in the
depths of Equatorial Africa. The French explorer and hunter, Marcel Pretre,
comes across a tribe of surprising small pygmies. He was even more surprised
when, among the smallest of these, in the Eastern Congo, Marcel found himself
facing a woman no more than forty-five centimetres tall, adult, black, silent
and pregnant. “Black as a monkey” he informed the press. He called her “Little Flower”. Her race will soon be exterminated.
Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, the
great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes that hunt them with nets
and eat them. For strategic defence they live in
the highest trees. The Likoualas use only a very limited language and their members communicate primarily by gestures. The explorer is amazed by this
unique creature, considering her the rarest and most extraordinary creature on
the earth because of her minute size. A photograph of Little Flower was
published in the colour supplement of the Sunday papers, life-size. She was
wrapped in a cloth, her belly already very big. She had a flat nose, a black
face, splay feet. She looked like a dog. When readers of the Sunday newspaper
see the photograph, they react in different ways: A woman said “It gives me the
creeps”.
A lady was upset all day, almost if
she was missing something. Little Flower made a little girl
feel that “Sorrow is endless”. A mother said to her daughter “Poor
little thing! How sad she is! It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn't human
sadness”. A clever little boy had a clever
idea: “She would be our toy!”
In another house they imagined her
serving their table, with her big little belly! In the meanwhile, in Africa,
methodically the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest human being.
It was at this moment that the smallest woman in the world began laughing warm,
warm. Little Flower was enjoying life. She was experiencing the sensation of
not having been eaten yet. So she was laughing. The rare thing herself felt in
her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer
and also the explorer’s ring and the explorer’s boots. In the jungle, love is
not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange colour
of a man who isn’t black, love is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. The explorer tried to smile back,
and then he was embarrassed. He coloured, prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour. The explorer getting control of
himself, severely recaptured the discipline of his work, and went on with his
note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few
articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now he could ask questions. Little Flower answered “Yes. It’s
very nice to have a tree of her own to live in.” Marcel Pretre had some difficult
moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes. “Well”, declared an old lady,
folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He's
doing”.
COMMENTS: In
my opinion, Clarice Lispector tells the reader a beautiful story, which serves
as an excuse for us to reflect on some topics. One of them is how people around the
world react to the image of “Little Flower”. Without knowledge or cause, these
people express fear of what the “civilized world” doesn’t know. This image
evokes highly emotional responses. Lispector calls attention to many individual
reactions. In two cases she noted the emptiness
of love and silence of Little Flower. In a home, a girl about to be married
felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mamma, look at her little picture, poor little thing!
Look how sad she is!” “But”, said the mother, “It’s the sadness of an animal.
It isn’t human sadness”. Here we can see the sympathy and subsequent
dehumanization of Little Flower. In another house, a boy asked his
mother if Little Flower would howl and if she would be their toy. Her child’s reaction makes her have
a lot of thoughts about her own feelings and the superficiality of their life. In another house, in each member of
the family was born the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for
itself. “Imagine her serving our table”. Meanwhile, in Africa, the explorer studied
the little belly of the smallest woman in the world, and for the first time he
felt sick, because for the first time she was laughing. She was enjoying life
because she wasn’t being devoured. This is the secret goal of a whole life. The
explorer was baffled. She loved that sallow explorer and
his ring and his boots too. The explorer had some thoughts about
the difference of the meaning of love in his world and in the humidity of the
forest where love is not to be eaten. The explorer tried to smile back,
and then he was embarrassed; he coloured prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour. Severely he recaptures the discipline
of his work. He has learned how understand some of the tribe’s few articulate
words. By now he could ask questions. Little Flower's answer “Yes. That is
very nice to have a tree of her own to live in” maybe could be interpreted as
an invitation from her to the explorer… At the end of the story, there is a
lady who declared “God knows what He’s doing”. In my opinion, with this end,
Lispector wanted to express that everything in our life can serve to reflect
and to improve in our feelings.
In the story, there
is the expression “a box within a box”. It’s something like the Russian dolls
called matryoshkas. There are some stories like matryoshkas, e.g., The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John
Fowles, where the story situated in the 19th century gets mixed with
the story of the two protagonists situated in the 20thcentury. In
our case, there is a big story, a “container story”, and then some smaller
stories inside the big one.
👉Do you remember other novels or narratives
with a similar struture?
*
👉How much is it, in centimetres, seventeen and
three-quarters inches?
*
The story is about a
pigmy woman. Pigmies exist now, and they live in the Congo basin. But some
years ago an ancient race of small people was discovered in Indonesia, in Flores
Island. They don’t exist anymore, but this people coexisted for a long period
of time with the humans as we know them now. Some people say some specimens of
this race were hiding in the jungle of their island... in the last century! But
our question is the “otherness”, the fact that, when we meet someone different
from us, we become some more aware of our identity. And there is a debate about
what is better for us people: to try to avoid or reject what is different from
us, or to try to get mixed with this alterity.
👉What is your opinion about this?
*
The explorer called
the woman “Little Flower”. This is a kind of compliment, but it’s also a evidence
that somebody have power upon another somebody. The explorer acts as if he was God: he gives
names to unknown things.
👉Why didn’t he ask her name? Why didn’t he introduce
himself?
*
In the story, two
tribes are mentioned, the Likoualas, whom Little Flower belongs to, and the
Bahundes, that hunt, kill and eat Likoualas.
👉But, which is the worst danger for the
Likoualas, the Bahundes or the explorer? That is: is the ecosystem as good as
we usually think for some species?
*
The Bahundes are
cannibals. Do you think that when we eat meat we are a kind of cannibals? There’s
a sentence in the story that begins “The sadness of an animal...” Can an animal
be sad as a human being? Animalists say animals have feelings, and so we cannot
kill or eat them.
👉But, when in a documentary you see a frog
being eaten by a snake, can you see horror on the frog's face?
*
The story talks about
a woman belonging to a tribe, but no other member of the tribe appears in the
tale, not a man, not even the woman’s child’s father, not even the chief of the
tribe.
👉Why do you think is that?
*
In “The Smallest...”
we have again (remember Conrad) a western man that compares the non western
being with a dog.
👉Do you think this comparison is a good one
(the dog is the man’s best friend) or, the other way round, a negative one (it
compares a person with an animal)?
*
Another topic we mentioned
when we talked about Zweig (his novel The
Heart’s Impatience) is the “perverted tenderness”, the confusion between love and pity. I think it happens something similar with philanthropy.
👉Is philanthropy a positive useful thing or
a perverted one?
*
“The woman [the one
who saw the picture in the paper] was upset all day, almost as she was missing
something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the
air.”
“And she had a horror
of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at
life and happiness. [...] ‘I’m going to buy him a new suit’, she decided.”
You can see here a
mixture of deep thoughts combined with ordinary observations or common desires.
This is a reminiscence of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialism:
we are transcendental beings, but, notwithstanding this, we have to eat,
breathe, walk..., the commonest of actions, because we live in the material world.
We are free spirits in a world that isn’t free, that is compact. They say Clarice Lispector was an existentialist
writer.
👉Can you tell us a bit
more about this existentialist thinking?
*
The woman loved the explorer, loved his boots, his ring..., and because these material objects, she loved him from head to toes, body and soul.
👉What is love, real love? Can we say "love = love + its circumstances"?
