The Lottery
June 26, 2008, 10:18 am
Posted by John McGreevy
As Terry Teachout points out, it’s been exactly sixty years since Shirley Jackson published her much anthologized “The Lottery.” I still remember the jolt the story gave me when first reading it in grade school. (Let’s beg off the question of *why* I was reading this story between absorption in radio broadcasts of Minnesota Twins games.) Would it make such an impact today? I doubt it, and not just because of Wes Craven. What seemed threatening in 1948 is an oppressive, small-minded community. What seems threatening in 2008 is an absence of community, a sense of a nation bowling alone.
I guess it depends on which community you’re in. Think High School. I think the Lottery is generally read in high school, and I think one of the reasons it continues to be popular among high school students is that many high school cliques are oppressive and small minded. “Mean Girls,” “John Tucker Must Die,” Carrie, etc. are all movies that deal with this teenage experience –over the course of decades.
Unfortunately, senseless violence is still with us.
And I also distinctly remember my double take, sometime in high school, at the ending to the story. Though not as jolting as the ending in Shirley Jackson’s classic, the surprise ending in Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Sniper” also gave me a start.
Interesting idea. Everybody who visits our town wants to know if we have a Lottery a la Shirley Jackson.
I’ll get my 12-year-old to read the story and report back.
OK, that didn’t take long. It’s summer, the kid’s bored, and I told him I wouldn’t hook him up to the Internet until he read it. Here are his thoughts:
1. I thought they were going to eat her. That would have been scarier. (No, dear, that’s “Suddenly Last Summer” …)
2. Everybody knows that if a story is called “The Lottery,” something creepy is going to happen. If you called it “The Raffle,” it would be more surprising if someone got killed, because you’d be expecting them to get a quilt or something. (Maybe we should do a Catholic version entitled “Bingo!”)
3. It would be a perfect story for one of “The Simpsons” Halloween episodes, which spoof famous horror stories. Homer would get the black spot, say, “Doh! This lottery is rigged!” (after his own attempt to rig it backfires) and then he’d try to palm off the spot on the hated Flanders, Moe (who’s always trying to do himself in on Christmas Eve), etc. etc.
Jean, I don’t know if you let your kid watch South Park, but there is an episode mixing the Britney Spears saga with the Lottery. And to all you skeptics, yes I did see it, completely independently of this post.
Here’s the Wikipedia description of the episode:
A 2008 episode of South Park titled “Britney’s New Look” depicted Britney Spears as being chosen as a sacrifice to ensure a good corn harvest. Instead of being stoned to death, she was photographed until she died. Many lines of dialogue during the climactic scene pay homage to The Lottery, and several shots from the 1969 film are recreated. An old man expresses his support of the tradition by saying “Sacrifice in March, corn have plenty starch,” a direct reference to Old Man Warner’s statement in the short story. Also, the mayor of the town in which they kill Britney Spears is named Mayor Summers, a reference to Mr. Summers.
The story hit my class plenty hard in the 80s, when all this bowling alone (terrific image, btw) began. I thought that English classes overdid the iconoclasm, actually. The Lottery, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter–all steamroller literature with the same basic Steal This Book! moral at the end. Like that’s a tough sell to adolescents.
I’m surprised we didn’t occupy the principal’s office. Then again, Ferris Bueller did that for us. Lazy kids.
Cathleen, we don’t watch “South Park,” but that episode sounds pretty durn funny. I think our son might get kicked out of church if he watched “SP.” Raber mentioned at one of his RCIA organizational meetings that we watch the Simpsons and the Church Ladies exchanged significant looks and comments were made.
So, back to John McG’s point, oppressive, small-minded communities are still alive and well, and we live in one right here. A Lottery-like story called “Hot Dish Supper” involving Church Ladies and wayward boys would probably creep my kid out plenty.
Kathy, we read the same books 25 years ago in high school. Our English teachers managed to wring the life out of them, except for “The Crucible,” which we saw as a thinly veiled play about a certain gang of cheerleaders who were cruel and manipulative. Not sure I saw any “Steal This Book” moral in any of them.
What would you have rather read? The GenXers were always a disappointing puzzlement to me as a teacher. Except one semester when I had them read the War Poets. These kids had grown up in relative peace and prosperity, and I figured they needed to know that people their age had, once upon a time, been rounded up by the draft and gotten shot up, gassed, disfigured and mentally messed up by the Great Powers. But I didn’t want to pick “my war” (Vietnam) because it was clear their antipathy for Boomers like me ran pretty deep.
Plus most of the poems were short and fit their slacker attention spans.
They responded well, even asked questions about why World War I had been fought, I ended up taking them to the library (no computers then!) to look at newspaper accounts and archival photos. We talked about the differences between horror for entertainment and true horrors of real life.
And those kids delivered on their papers! It was one of the most satisfying semesters I ever had, bless them. That generation gap closed a smidge for those several weeks.
(Sorry, John McG, I did go off the rail there, much as I intended to stay on track …)
Jean and Cathleen: As an avid South Park watcher, I can’t resist putting in a word about the Spears episode. In many ways, I was simply stunned throughout the episode. Jean, on the outside chance you happen to want to see it, I sure you could watch it online. There is a website with every SP episode on it. I am not suggesting the episode is bad, but I am not sure I laughed much. Rather, I kept thinking to myself, “I can’t believe these guys are doing this!”
Now, if you want funny and relevance to dotComm discussions at the same time, you need to watch the Easter Bunny episode.
Whooooops! Raber reminds me I was in high school more like 40 years ago reading those same books of Kathy’s. Sorry for the glitch in the time/space continuum. I guess I just want to think of myself as eternally 40.
Joe, I have dial-up, so watching a 30-second YouTube bit takes an hour to download. I’ll see if they have that episode at the video store sometime when my kid is away for the day.
Meantime, he liked the idea of Horror Bingo so much, he sketched out this idea for a lottery-like story. I offer it with the author’s permission. It may be helpful to know that he has an extreme aversion to some types of sound (and other stimuli) that go along with the ADD. He also dislikes paragraphing because “it makes a person think too slow.”
BINGO
The church hall was packed. Ross was agnostic, but he knew the building all too well; he was there for bingo every Thursday. He bought two cards and sat down in his lucky seat, the one next to the filing cabinets. The caller, Mrs. Hutchkins began with the rules, as usual. Then, she began calling numbers off. “Under the B… Twelve,” This was a weird kind of bingo, the winner was taken to a small room and stayed there for several days. Most people played here because they were curious about what was in the room. “Under the I… Four,” The woman sitting next to Ross had an almost-bingo; she only needed one number to win: G34. “Under the N… Fifty-two,” Now Ross only needed two numbers to win. “Under the G… Thirty-four,” The woman stood up and yelled “Bingo!” Mrs. Hutchkins smiled and said, “Alright, follow Mr. Dorris to the Room,” The lady nodded and followed Mr. Dorris down the hall. “Under the B… Seven,”
Now Ross only needed one number to win. “Under the O… Sixty-five. Under the I… Nine. Under the B…-” This was the letter Ross needed. “Twenty-” Ross prayed a six. “Six.” Ross stood up and said, “Bingo,” Mrs. Hutchkins replied, “You know where to go, dear,” Ross followed Mr. Dorris into an empty room with Sterios, Speakers, almost anything you could name that could play music. Mr. Dorris said, “Sit down, please,” There was a chair in the middle of the room. He sat, and Mr. Dorris went out the door. It shut and locked behind him. Then, over all the music-devices came a horrible sound: Muzak being played soft and slow. Ross screamed. “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
I have never heard of the story (I thought it was a book, but it is a short story).
Read it here: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lotry.html
Before I quit hogging this thread let me plug Jackson’s memoir, “Life Among the Savages,” about living in the country with her husband and four kids. It is one of the most hilarious things I ever read. It’s a shame she died so young.
I never liked stories like the Lottery. It is just too heartless for me. Yet there is the true story of the Holocaust. I want to deny that story, too. Very, very sad.
Redemption saves it and God’s justice and that is our hope. Yet it is still incredible that such things would occur. It still seems unbelievable.
I’m with you on this one, Bill.
Now the Bingo story–that one I like!
Bill, not sure where you’re coming from.
Seems to me that the whole point of stories like “The Lottery” is to amplify the notion that, collectively, people justify sacrificing a few scapegoats for the greater good, and if that wasn’t the impetus behind the Holocaust–the Jews are our problem and when we eradicate we’ll be pure and prosperous–what is?
“The Lottery,” at least on one level, is a vision of a world run by superstition, prejudice, blind tradition, one where life is cheap, and God demands the sacrifices rather than makes them.
Perhaps it’s no longer quite so horrifying, as John McG suggests, because we ourselves live in a world that’s becoming more callous and cold.
Jean,
It’s wo/man’s inhumanity to wo/man that disturbs me. The problem of evil. The catastrophe of Lisbon which shook up Voltaire and most of Europe does not disturb me. God will rectify it. It is when people torture and kill, starve, maim, isolate other people which is awful. God will rectify that too. Yet the evil act is not a great sight to behold. The cover-up of the bishops comes under this category where children were allowed to be preyed upon again. It exists in and out of religion.
One easily understands original sin. Augustine got it all wrong with baptism but the wickedness in humans is remarkable. This is why it is so important not to participate in this in any way. And we do have the antidote; The Sermon on the Mount.
Again, I’m with Bill. It’s not that the tales ring false in their cruelty, but that they ring true. It’s just awful to think about human cruelty, the turning of the screw.
Philistine that I am, I don’t even read a lot of Flannery O’Connor. That poor girl with the artificial leg–it’s just too cruel. Yes, I know that’s the whole point, but I really don’t like the thought.
You may have read “The Habit of Being” already, Kathy, but if not, this posthumous collection of Flannery O’Connor’s correspondence puts her often jarring short stories and novels in clearer perspective, especially the influence of Christian realism and O’Connor’s deep Catholic faith on her writing. O’Connor’s letters are also often witty, and they’re a strong reminder that letter writing was once an art form.
Bill and Kathy, apologies for being thick, but I don’t get a clear idea of what you’re saying.
That you don’t want to read stories like “The Lottery” because the human cruelty is too true to life and unpleasant? And that reading about made-up evil somehow lessens or distracts our ability to perceive and respond to real evil?
In which case, isn’t that a condemnation of all literature, which, at some level, ends up exploring the tension between good and evil, right and wrong, sn and forgiveness? I’m running through the last dozen books I’ve read, and I don’t know that you can even have a plot in a story without that tension.
William,
Thanks for the suggestion! As it happens, one of my professors gave me O’Connor’s Collected Works at college graduation, so I’ve gotten to know and admire her through her letters as you say. Which only makes things worse: I’m like one of those southern ladies who wants her to write “nice” stories. I’m like the guys at Faulkner’s drugstore.
Jean,
With me it’s just a matter of taste, I suppose. I don’t like to think about cruelty. I don’t like horror movies, not even a little bit. I hardly even like celebrity gossip or car wrecks. If you want to put it in literary-theological terms, I avoid stories that are about the fall, unless they are evidently also about redemption. So I don’t have any use for Virginia Woolf or Truman Capote, supposing I understand them. As for O’Connor, I’m glad she’s there for folks, and I appreciate what she’s doing and how well she does it, but I can’t usually countenance the horror of it.
And yet I don’t like easy redemption (no chicken soup, thank you, and very little Dickens!) So I’m hard to please. William Trevor, sometimes, and Walker Percy, they can tell me a story.
“In which case, isn’t that a condemnation of all literature, which, at some level, ends up exploring the tension between good and evil, right and wrong, sin and forgiveness?”
Jean, I don’t object to the above. The tension between is certainly cathartic and healing. But in stories like the lottery everyone knows the cruel and evil ending and agree all the way. There is no tension. It is just a question of who is going to get stoned. And, if I read it right, all are complicit as they willingly participate.
Thanks for the clarification, Bill, but I would argue that you’re not giving the story a fair shake.
Individual characters within the story show discomfort and fear of the lottery. People whisper to each other that they hope certain friends won’t be chosen. Collectively, however, they go along with it.
It’s true that redemption does not lie within the bounds of the story.
It lies with how the story has changed the reader and challenged him to acknowledge that what he has “seen” in the village is wrong and to examine to what extent he tolerates complicit evil in his own society. The reader is forced to go away un-catharted and healed by the author in order to make his own healing elsewhere.
I hope nothing I said implied that I was a fan of blood-and-guts horror. I worked in a hospital ER in college, and I had enough of the real thing to last me a lifetime. But FWIW, there is very little gore in “The Lottery,” and I think that’s intentional in order to focus more on the sin, superstition and fear–the real sources of horror.