Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

See, that's what made me think of Germany and other western European countries during the holocaust.

I agree that while one can talk about the economic or -ismness of the story, that it's not the real point.

To me, Pavel, what you bring up gets at the heart of the question of why human sacrifice is believed to be beneficial at all. Who came up with that one? How did they prove it to the others? Or was such fear created around what would happen if it wasn't done that it was too "big" to question?

For something so horrible to get to the point where it's not even questioned... is deeper than a mythology and, in my opinion, stranger than a blind leap of faith into something that benefits the village as a whole.

And the fear of questioning -- what might happen to a person if they do question? -- is greater than the fear that it might be you next time around.

I want to talk more about this Salon story as it relates to themes in the story.

There are so many significant connections... this seems to me to be one of those stories in which we are being offered a lens into the life of the writer and her intentions... and my earliest post about reader response in the New Yorker makes a ton of sense if you think about people more or less recognizing themselves or being touchy about the state of society at the time.

If you think about the schism for her mentally/personally, and maybe you consider for a moment that the people of the village are her own psyche - the part of her psyche that recognized what "normal" was and wanted the less "wild" version of her to go away - then it can be a story about societal pressure to conform making its way into an actual personality. Or the pressure we put on ourselves to be proper, to fit in, to behave a certain way.

And then there's the idea that it's an actual critique of the behavior of the people of her real-life village ostracizing her.

There is one significant difference between the human sacrifice rituals I can remember reading about and this one, though I could be totally wrong about this...

Aren't most of these rituals performed by one person, historically speaking?

If so, this is an astonishing peek into the will of the collective, and maybe we're actually talking about fascism here.

Or maybe we're not talking about any ism at all. Given the Lethem article above, this could be about collective cruelty, exorcism...

A couple of interesting lines and things I noticed...

"the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them" (about the children on summer break)

Delacroix means, in French, of the cross.

That the lottery is conducted in the same manner and by the same person as "the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program"

The discussion around putting papers in the black box instead of chips of wood... further gives the air that this ritual is something people think about a lot and discuss how to conduct efficiently... which makes it all the more horrific.

That as the lottery is conducted there is conversation about abandoning it.

"Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones." -- that the villagers had left behind the ritual but retained the cruel method of actually killing.

OK, I know most people don't geek out about technology at this level but I really liked this article:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/eb...

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.

The electronic book is the latest example of how HTML continues to win out over competing, often nonstandardized, formats. E-books aren’t websites, but E-books are distributed electronically. Now the dominant E-book format is XHTML. Web standards take on a new flavor when rendering literature on the screen, and classic assumptions about typography (or “formatting”) have to be adjusted.

Matt, thanks for that Lethem post.

My apologies for my absence today, work and a fantastic reading by Joyce Carol Oates distracted me.

I really want to dismiss the academic bullshit, too, because to me, this story is about visceral, primal impulse as much as it is about thoughtless following of savage tradition.

This makes me really want to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I don't have a ton to add tonight. Trying to get some of my own writing done. But I have some thoughts I will start to add tomorrow.

Capitalism?

Hm. I guess in a T.S. Eliot's Wasteland kind of a way... where we are all lemmings, or a Pink Floyd Brick in the Wall sort of way...

But given the time it was written, I was thinking totalitarianism... or the Holocaust.

Maybe. It is ritualized killing, and the intent is to "cleanse" society.

Do we use the death penalty to exorcise the evil out of ourselves vicariously? I don't know. I think it has more to do with collective vengeance and a kind of sinister voyeurism around death than any kind of true cleansing. If that's even a reasonable, viable purpose behind it.

Certainly has nothing to do with making the crops grow better, even if the intent is a less "evil" society...

So, I've been thinking about this sacrifice thing some more, I think it's important to get my head around it before reading this story again.

I have been wondering what human need it served and serves.

So - the taking of a life to ensure or guarantee a good crop seems to be the most prevalent "reason" for the rituals.

I have a few things floating through my head, here.

First there is the obvious: needs of the many outweighing needs of the few. If blood was perceived as necessary to shed in order to get food to grow... then the survival of the group does become worth the sacrifice, if you really believe that it helps.

I do wonder how it was decided across so many cultures in history that human sacrifice did what so many believed it did. I mean, what if... what if... they had something, there?

I know, it sounds like a crazy question, not one I'm able to answer. Shirley Jackson was willing, at least in words, to ask questions around what it would be like today if we still did it, if we still believed it helped the group survive.

But when I was studying Mayan history I was astonished at just how much they knew, and that everything they did - right down to the ball game they played - was weighted with meaning within their culture. Granted, the Aztecs were the group who did most of the sacrificing, but still. These civilizations were more advanced than most of us give them credit for, and one of the reasons we don't is the human sacrifice issue.

But here is what I am also wondering: is it really about channeling what is rotten within a group of people and exorcising it through the death of one person? Believing that we can get rid of our negative, thanatos energy through getting rid of just one member?

I'm totally going to segue right out of my own conversation and talk about HoM. I think that Wharton's "problems" typically center around what a woman's life can look like without a husband. And whether or not the kind of marriage women of her class entered into could ever be "happy" in any way. And what marriage really *is* -- and what happens to women who step outside of the boundaries -- answer: they are severely punished and sometimes die for their transgressions. For my part, I have lots of conclusions... many of them around class and property, how our perception and purpose around marriage has shifted, changing where we stand now.

OK. Enough already. :)

All that said, I like this approach. I do that too - think about novels for a really long time after I read them.

Whoops! Thanks, Margaret!

I'm going to go all Joseph Campbell on you before we start discussing the story itself and ask - why human sacrifice?

How deeply is it tied to animal sacrifice? Was it viewed as a sort of ultimate sacrifice or as much the same thing? Why did people believe that choosing another human to ritualistically kill would help them in their world?

There are so many examples in ancient and religious literature and history. Abraham, in particular - that story always mystifies me. Greek mythology. Aztec history. Egypt. And those Druids.

I will have to dig through my Jung and Campbell before reading the story to figure this one out. In the meantime, I found this little Wikipedia quote:

There has been a lot of debate on the primacy of myth vs. ritual, and the presence of a myth of human sacrifice should not be taken as necessarily implying the historical existence of the actual practice: human sacrifice may be taken as the re-enactment of an older myth, or conversely a myth can be taken as a memory of an earlier practice of human sacrifice. Theistic rationalizations of human sacrifice may involve the idea of offering to deities as payment for favorable interventions in an event of special importance, to forestall unfavorable events, or to purchase disclosures about the physical world.

A few things to know about this story.

It was first printed in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948. The day the story takes place is June 27.

The magazine and Jackson were surprised by the negative response. The story was banned in South Africa and hate mail flowed into the magazine throughout the summer. Many people cancelled their subscriptions.

Of the letters, all of which were forwarded to her, Jackson said: "The general tone of the early letters ... was a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch."

In response to the criticism, Jackson has said:

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

I know it sounds like kind of a silly topic but I think about this a lot when I go to read a book.

As an English major in college, I was well-versed in literary theory. What kind of paper do you want? Historicist? Feminist? Deconstructionist - using who, Derrida, Foucault? Freudian? How about Jung (a favorite then and now)? Take your pick! I had the patter down.

I can still read for theory, just barely. It doesn't feel genuine to me. The problem is its myopic view, in my opinion. That said, once you're trained to read a text a certain way, can you ever totally escape it?

I had a couple of writing professors in college who used to say things to me that had the general air of: How would you feel if someone only read your work to figure out how you felt about your mother? You need to write things people connect with. That's the most important thing.

I was thinking about this as I read the Salinger thread here, and Light in August for the second time. What's my approach? The first time around, my approach was attentive to the enth degree: I was reading a Great Book, and it deserved my complete focus. I read pages at a time out loud to get the poetry of the language. I re-read whole chapters, 2, 3 times. I also used my typical "naive" approach so that I would stay away from the academic impulse of critiquing the view of women, or race, etc.

The second time, since I knew what to expect from the language and plot, I read for connection to and understanding of the characters.

Do you all have an approach when you pick up a book? Or maybe you have one you aren't thinking about? Do you have different approaches for different kinds of books?

I'm all for mocking. Where would we be without mocking?

I am pretty sure that the people who submitted their rules for this article thought it was an amusing idea and didn't take it all that seriously.

It's just for fun, people. Jeez.

Excellent point, Bonita.

Makes me think of the gulf between man and woman.

But I think about that so much these days that I'm afraid I'm projecting!

Yes!

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

~Rumi

Right, there is the whole sense of blood, of life force, being removed from her. Of life being removed from her because the giving was not accepted.

Or maybe there's something more sinister, as Bonita suggests. I do believe there are people out there to whom we give various names - takers, emotional vampires, and other silly nomenclature - but people who take our energy and use it for themselves.

Otherwise, why a parasite that normally infects birds?

Exactly! I've been pondering that one so much lately. This story comes to me like... synchronicity!

I'm still stuck on the title, though. The thing that hid the horrible parasite.

Why is that the title of the story?