What is your opinion about the expressive purpose of these stories? Do they serve a purpose, and what is it?
“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
When Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was first published in 1948, it’s dark themes provoked outrage. Readers of The New Yorker, literary critics and public intellectuals alike expressed horror and bafflement over the story, arguing that it was “perverse” and “sadistic”: anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber wrote that “[i]f Shirley Jackson’s intent was to symbolize into complete mystification and at the same time be gratuitously disagreeable, she certainly succeeded” (Franklin). And yet, in spite of it’s supposed senseless violence, the story has endured as a literary classic.
What makes it such a memorable story? Many readers have found it a powerful allegory for the dark side of human nature. In 1948 readers immediately saw parallels in the story to the treatment of Jewish people in WWII, but the story can also function as a broader parable about our capacity for violence. The editor of the New Yorker at the time wrote:
Miss Jackson’s story can be interpreted in half a dozen different ways. It’s just a fable.… She has chosen a nameless little village to show, in microcosm, how the forces of belligerence, persecution, and vindictiveness are, in mankind, endless and traditional and that their targets are chosen without reason. (Franklin)
I would argue that part of what makes this story powerful is it’s conciseness and its generality: while the story is full of “realistic” detail, there are no clear ties to a specific time and place, a fact that makes the story open to many forms of interpretation. Like Leguin’s “The Ones Who Walk Awal from Omelas” this story also limits our knowledge: we know the villagers conduct a dark ritual, but we are not given the reason for this act.
This mystery means we are left to puzzle over the story, trying out different interpretations to see which ones fit. The story endures, I believe, not only because it is shocking, but because readers want to solve the problem it poses: why this senseless violence? We tell ourselves that if we can only understand the story, then maybe we can solve the riddle of human nature and transcend the violence once and for all.
“The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a classic tale by Colombian writer and master of magic realism Gabriel Garcia Marquez. While the genre is popular world-wide, magic realism is often associated with Latin America. As the name suggests, it is characterized by a juxtaposition of realistic and fantastical elements in the same story:
“magic realism” is marked by its imaginative content, vivid effects, and lingering mystery. In combining fantastic elements with realistic details, a writer like García Márquez can create a fictional “world” where the miraculous and the everyday live side-by-side—where fact and illusion, science and folklore, history and dream, seem equally “real,” and are often hard to distinguish. (Faulkner)
Like the dystopia and the utopia, magic realism is another example of writers offering readers an alternative vision of the world, a surreal or distorted “mirror” onto which we can project our questions about the nature of reality and humanity. In a magic realist story, fact and fiction are blended, and poetic logic and rationality sit side by side, neither one more important than the other. The question this genre raises is one about the nature of truth: is there a kind of knowledge that we can only achieve through fantasy, and what is it? Why do we need a story about a very old man with enormous wings in order to better understand our own humanity?
Faulkner, Tom. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. Gale Online Encyclopedia Online.
https://go-gale-com.ocadu.idm.oclc.org/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&u=toro37158&id=GALE%7C
H1420022918&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon Accessed May 25, 2020.
Franklin, Ruth. “‘The Lottery’ Letters.” The New Yorker. 25 Jun. 2013.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-lottery-letters
Accessed online 25 May 2020.
Discussion Questions
1.What is your opinion about the expressive purpose of these stories? Do they serve a purpose, and what is it?
2.Compare how human nature is represented in these two stories: what do they have in common? What are their most important differences?
3.Both stories are mysterious: they leave many questions unanswered. What are some questions you feel are raised by these stories, and what kind of answers do you have for those questions?
4.Discuss the writing style of each story: how does style affect meaning?
