Thursday, June 16, 2011

Bloomsday


June 16, 1904 is legendary for two events, one of which never really happened. The date exists in reality and in fancy. On that day, the young author James Joyce escorted his bride-to-be, Nora Barnacle, to Ringsend, a village outside Dublin. In a separate iteration of that selfsame day, Leopold Bloom, advertising salesman and Everyman, embarked on the most sublimely banal excursion in modern literature. If Ulysses is an allegory of the modern experience, then it's all the more fitting that we, its readers, commemorate the journey of that novel's hero as though it really happened -- a veritable holiday. What a thing of wonders is our collective memory!

Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Black Spot: Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"


There are two related myths about history. One concerns the evolution of time, the idea that time is constantly unfolding in advance of some final incarnation, like utopia. The other is that man, who exists in time, is constantly outpacing the primal aggressions and irrational impulses of his prehistoric and uncivilized origins.

Shirley Jackson's haunting tale, "The Lottery," deconstructs these myths, though without the hopeless pessimism we might expect from such a deconstruction.

The story is set in a small, nondescript village during an annual "lottery." Neighboring villages, we learn, have a similar tradition, but some have been doing away with it. While the townsfolk gather in the square to take part in this ritual, a group of boys is piling up stones, as though in preparation for a game of war. The village official who organizes the lottery produces a black wooden box filled with slips of paper, from which every adult male will take several pieces and distribute them to the members of his family. An old man, under whose steely gaze this ceremony has been watched and conducted for generations, remarks that the lottery has always yielded a good crop, a hint of the superstitions underpinning the ceremony. Finally when the slips of paper have been meted out, the townsfolk will open their pursed hands and look inside. On one of these scraps is marked a black circle, betokening an act of brutality and inhumanity that belies the quaintness of this seemingly well-ordered village.

When "The Lottery" was published in 1948, it aroused a violent public reaction. Jackson received hate mail and harsh criticism, readers cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine in which the story was featured (The New Yorker), and in the following years, discussion groups were formed to better understand this bizarre story. In a sharp turn of critical awareness, "The Lottery" has since been integrated into school reading programs, having become an educational rite of passage for many young students.

Though one may not be able to imagine the shock produced by "The Lottery" when it first appeared, who can doubt it? Sneaking into public circulation amidst the growing anxiety of a "cold war," Shirley Jackson's haunting parable was not only a blow to American confidence in its own noble character and mission, but was inimical to the perception of man as innately good and capable of civilization. Earlier in the century, the Anglo-Polish writer, Joseph Conrad, challenged this myth in novels which evoked the barbarism latent in purportedly civilized Western society. The "Lottery" was, by analogy, America's own "Heart of Darkness," and caused its own reverberations.

In one sense, "The Lottery" overturns the hackneyed notion of the innocent and gentle countryside, the pastoral idyll as envisioned by Virgil and many Renaissance poets. But that assessment limits the story and its author's intentions too strictly. Jackson was writing an allegory of the human soul, and she was drawing on the wide span of human history to show that something was deeply wrong, particularly in the light of two devastating world wars. As the story suggests, there is a deep reservoir of irrational impulsivity in human society, a notion that had been gaining currency since the mid-nineteenth century, reinforced in particular by Sigmund Freud, who discovered an underworld of strange and largely unconscious menace lurking beneath genteel Viennese society.

For Jackson, as for Freud, that menace is an atavism of man's primal heritage. History and human enlightenment have failed to eradicate it. We must live with our innate barbarism and suppress it with layers of civilization (albeit to our discontent, as Freud theorized). Yet, like Freud, Jackson seemed to believe that this irrationality could be controlled. While the "lottery" symbolizes the antiquated traditions, rituals, and superstitions that man preserves against his better reason, it fails to hold man in perpetual sway, as seen in its repudiation by other villages. Thus as an allegory of the human soul, "The Lottery" also reflects, if meekly, an optimism about man's inclinations toward freedom and happiness.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Mr. Cogito greets you


To all newcomers and new readers, Mr. Cogito says hello. As you are now privy to secret knowledge, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg will be watching.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

The Case of Alonso Quijano


No one ever asks what prompted Alonso Quijano, the legendary Don Quixote, to read so much fantasy literature in his late forties. We know he once infamously tilted at a windmill in his rusty armor on his old nag -- just one of a series of strange misadventures on his illusory quest -- because of what he read in that literature, and the prodigious doses in which he read it. It is generally known from Cervantes' great novel that Quijano, an impoverished Hidalgo of the village of La Mancha, went mad from excessive reading in a genre unsuited to reality. But we know almost nothing of his back story, save for what can be inferred from his status, age, and accoutrements. He is simply "one of those gentlemen with a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound." Do we need to know more? Probably not. Alonso Quijano is more recognizable to us through the things he owns than through a description of his past.

Which does not mean he has no past. What caused him then to devote all his waking hours to chivalric romances? Perhaps if we turn our gaze to the unused lance on its rack, the rusting shield festooned with cobwebs, and the old charger, we might understand that old gentleman more clearly. They are the traces of his noble lineage, the relics of a would-be knight errant whose own chanson de geste is sounded in his mind, a mind more expansive and clamorous with every novel he touches. Can you hear his song? It's becoming more audible as it becomes less reasonable. But it's no less reasonable than it is intensely satisfying, for Alonso Quijano's world to this moment has been a of tedium, disappointment, and resentment. He is at last becoming the hero of his own longed-for narrative, a hero of his time and ours, and the world around him seems to be changing for him -- dragons and giants are materializing across the land, notorious brigands are creeping off yellowing pages, fair ladies and duchesses are appearing in castle towers.

After setting aside the last book he will ever read, Alonso Quijano puts out the candle, lays himself on his straw-filled bed, and thinks of a new name with which to meet this new world. Before he falls asleep, he will murmur to himself a name as fitting to him as it is unusual and famous to the rest of us: Don Quixote.