We’re all living in the world of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’

If there’s one thing that unites us, it’s the ability to pass the buck. It’s never our fault, and there’s always someone else to accuse. As Charlie Campbell writes in Scapegoat: “In the beginning there was blame. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and we’ve been hard at it ever since. It is our original sin, this refusal to accept responsibility for our actions.”

Pointing fingers at other countries, cultures, and communities, then, is as old as the Himalayas. The digital age has only amplified this tendency. Tweets, posts and comments dealing with pseudo-science, conspiracy theories and dark rumours drown out realistic assessments. In Campbell’s words, “there might not be a cure, but there’s always a culprit.”

Societies need scapegoats in order to feel better about themselves. The Americans hounded so-called witches in Salem, the French prosecuted Albert Dreyfus, and the Russians held Rasputin responsible for the state of the nation. At times, such practices become ritualised, part of hoary tradition, with whipping boys, cleansing rituals and purification ceremonies.

Take for instance the concept of the “sin-eater” that was observed in many cultures. Such a person was called upon to consume a symbolic meal at a funeral, typically of bread. This practice would enable him to absorb the misdeeds of the deceased, and thus safeguard the entire community.

Few works of fiction have captured the smug self-satisfaction of scapegoating – and the attendant horrors -- better than Shirley Jackson’s much-anthologised and dissected short story, ‘The Lottery’. Over the years, it’s been adapted for stage, TV, opera, and ballet, and even featured in an episode of The Simpsons. However, after it was first published in an issue of the New Yorker in 1948, the magazine was flooded by angry letters and subscription cancellation requests — the most mail it had ever received in response to a short story.

Bewilderment, speculation and abuse

Many readers called it “outrageous”, “gruesome”, or “utterly pointless”. Jackson herself was later to recall that the letters contained three main themes: bewilderment, speculation, and plain old-fashioned abuse. Such is the consistency of trolls.

Ruth Franklin, Jackson’s biographer, has written that ‘The Lottery’ takes “the classic theme of man’s inhumanity to man and gives it an additional twist: the randomness inherent in brutality.” It contains no unnecessary dramatics and flourishes. Jackson makes the tale unfold in a simple, unfussy manner and this goes a long way to enhance its startling impact.

The story is set in a nondescript New England village on a clear summer morning when “the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”Schoolchildren play while stuffing stones into their pockets – an ominous foreshadowing – while men speak of “planting and rain, tractors and taxes”, and women exchange bits of gossip as they go to join their husbands.

The residents are gathering in the public square for a lottery that is to be conducted by an individual of the type who is perfectly ordinary and perfectly familiar. Round-faced and jovial, “he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him, because he had no children and his wife was a scold.”

It becomes clear that the lottery is an annual event, perhaps a harvesting tradition, and a ritual cherished by the village. When one character mentions that some other communities have abandoned the practice, she is told by an old-timer that “there has always been a lottery.” Those thinking of giving it up are just a “pack of young fools”.

The assembled families start to draw slips from a shabby black box. Missing people are accounted for, and those who draw blanks heave sighs of relief. Slowly and alarmingly, the purpose of the draw becomes evident. It’s the victimisation at the heart of an utterly ordinary situation which makes ‘The Lottery’ so unnerving, and which caused its first readers to react the way they did.

In a disconcertingly apt comment, the novelist AM Homes remarked that Jackson’s characters are “trapped by the petty prejudices of people who make themselves feel good by thinking they are somehow better than us all.” It’s a trait that’s hardly confined to characters in fiction.

Jackson went on to compose many other spooky, well-regarded stories and novels, especially The Haunting of Hill House, a cryptic Gothic fantasy. She once said that she wrote because of a fascination for “the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviour”.

With ‘The Lottery’, such behaviour is enshrined in a form of tradition, in following the herd, and in a blindness to consequences. In this way, Jackson unpicked a seam of human conduct that has stayed scarily relevant, especially in our pandemic-stricken times.

As Jonathan Lethem once put it, she wrote about “the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community and sometimes even in a single mind.” In such a lottery, there are no winners.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.