The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Literary nationalism’s another Rushmore lie. I guess the word “American,” prefixed to anything, widens jaded eyes and shifts copies, but my reading life wasn’t geopolitically orderly. Did I care that Lewis Carroll or Aesop were European when they lit my fuse? The first long novel I vanished inside was called Nobody’s Boy, a translation of the classic Sans Famille, but did I, at ten, notice the French title in parentheses? Particularly in late-twentieth-century English, where Rushdie and Ishiguro and even the translated Murakami seemed as hot-wired to my own vocabularies and curiosities as anyone American or even living down the block, why should I consent to the dull imposition of the national context? It wasn’t how I embarked to where I was headed, so why should it be where I arrived when I got there?

  Literary competition is not a zero-sum game with a single winner, or even a ranked list of winners—that all-too-naïve image of the canon in which, say, Shakespeare has first place and the gold cup, followed by Chaucer with the silver, in second place, Milton with the bronze, in third … The concept of literary quality is an outgrowth of a conflictual process, not a consensual one. In the enlarged democratic field, the nature of the conflict simply becomes more complex. Even among the most serious pursuers of the aesthetic, there is more than one goal; there is more than one winner. Multiple qualities and multiple achievements are valued—and have been valued throughout the history of the conflicting practices of writing making up the larger field called the literary.

  —SAMUEL R. DELANY, “Emblems of Talent”

  The arts are produced by overcrowding.

  —WILLIAM EMPSON, Some Versions of Pastoral

  Washington Irving, in a little story called “The Mutability of Literature,” in his Sketch Book, wrote: “The inventions of paper and the press have put an end to all restraints … the stream of literature has expanded into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea … The world will inevitably be overstocked with good books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to learn their names.” Lamenting the torrent of books is a frequently-encountered modern trope (one of its greatest exponents being Jonathan Swift). For 16th-to-19th century people of a certain cast of mind, the printing press was what their latter-day fellow-travelers call the MFA program: the Death of Literature.

  —MATTHEW BATTLES

  Pre-1985, we are victims of the availability heuristic—we’ve no idea whether there was vastly more fabulous culture to be created than we created because, of course, it was never created. A function of classism, racism, sexism, capitalism, totalitarianism, religion, and technology …

  —RICHARD NASH

  The hiding-in-plain-sight aspect of Rushmoreism is the minimalist head count: “three or four,” like Beatles or an outfield. This is the source of my lazy default to the received notion of an “unceasing tide of new titles”—the rote complaint that the floodgates are too wide. I want to chip at this part of Rushmore, too. Cognitive science has established how annoyed our brains are to be asked to count above five or six; supermarkets learn it’s shrewd to make five premium mustards available, not twenty. And it’s a standard trope of middle age to get grouchy at swarms of new, unrecognizable stuff: Forgivable, then, is the middle-aged author’s lament of overpublication, which crops up routinely. I suppose it’s forgivable, too, from young newcomers full of feral juice, motivated by terror that they’ll arrive pre-drowned-out.

  But why should our grasp of literary culture, in its current state of explosive abundance and range, be hostage to this hindbrain’s coping impulse? What matters, in reading, is discernment and engagement, not the size of the field upon which those occur. It matters even less that the field be shrunken to assuage dumb anxieties that we’re missing something worthwhile. (Trust me, we’re missing something worthwhile.) How on earth can abundance damage anything for anyone, unless what’s damaged is some critic’s pining to control what shouldn’t be controlled, or to circumscribe boundlessness?

  Acknowledging abundance entails no surrender of standards. (That should go without saying, but in this era of bogus alarms about abdicated standards, doesn’t.) Here’s another view from snotty bookstore-clerkland: Every year there was a “literary” novel that was the novel read by the people who didn’t read novels anymore, the people who hadn’t been reading novels for years but hadn’t yet admitted it to themselves. The memo would go out: X is the book that will stand in for caring about novels for another twelve months or so; read it and you’ve punched the clock, read it and your ass is covered. (I’m sure this phenomenon makes publishers very happy; I’m also sure it leads them to make some terrible decisions.) Some years the novel that occupied that role was a good one, some years, well, not so good. But there was nothing funnier to those of us at the bookstore who took novel-reading as seriously as life itself than talking with the customer who, in the past four years, had read only Perfume, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Snow Falling on Cedars, and who has now rushed anxiously to the purchase counter with Smilla’s Sense of Snow gripped in his mitts. Such customers were always anxious, for trying not to be left out of something you are fundamentally out of is an anxious business. Will I like this book as much as those others? That’s what this customer wanted to know. Is this the right book to read, this year?

  But the answer was simple: Of course you’ll like it. That book is guaranteed to blow your mind. Starve yourself of the experience of the novel and every novel’s a feast, a revelation. Every novel is Cervantes.

  Standards require not only the acknowledgment of abundance but the absorption of abundance. How can any honest reader, or critic, make abundance the enemy? It rules the past—sorry, but that’s unfixable. I may die never having gotten to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling or The Worm Ouroboros or An Armful of Warm Girl, books that for twenty years or so I’ve had staring from my shelf, radiating the possibility they’d rewire my brain if I’d only squeeze them into my schedule. You may, if you hadn’t heard of them before, die before seeing their titles mentioned a second time.

  Demographics, and what Delany calls the “democratized field,” determine that abundance will even more brazenly rule the future.

  Time sorts.

  Can we embrace both operations? Probably not, no more than we can either embrace mortality or get our heads around infinity. Carving three or four heads on Rushmore, or pounding out another dull list of the top-ten this-or-that, may be a kind of death-in-life, an attempt to freeze the chaos of abundance at a tolerable place. It is also a somewhat understandable flinching response to the prospect of perishing by dissolution.

  But me, I’d sooner drown in a sea of books than die in space where I can hear only myself scream.

  Outcastle

  Ten and twenty years ago I used to play a minor parlor trick; I wonder if it would still work. When asked my favorite writer, I’d say “Shirley Jackson,” counting on most questioners to say they’d never heard of her. At that I’d reply, with as much smugness as I could muster: “You’ve read her.” When my interlocutor expressed skepticism, I’d describe “The Lottery”—still the most widely anthologized American short story of all time, I’d bet, and certainly the most controversial (and widely censored) story ever to debut in The New Yorker—counting the seconds to the inevitable widening of my victim’s eyes: They’d not only read it, they could never forget it. I’d then happily take credit as a mind reader, though the trick was too easy by far. I don’t think it ever failed.

  Jackson is one of American fiction’s impossible presences, too material to be called a phantom in literature’s house, too in print to be “rediscovered.” She’s both perpetually underrated and persistently mischaracterized as a writer of upscale horror, when in truth a slim minority of her work has any element of the supernatural (Henry James wrote more ghost stories). While celebrated by reviewers through her career, she wasn’t welcomed into any canon or school; she’s been no major critic’s fetish. Sterling in her craft, Jackson is prized by the writers who read her, yet it would be self-c
ongratulatory to claim her as a writer’s writer. Rather, Shirley Jackson has thrived, at publication and since, as a reader’s writer. Her most famous works—“The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House—are more famous than her name and have sunk into cultural memory as timeless artifacts, seeming older than they are, with the resonance of myth or archetype. The same aura of folkloric familiarity attaches to less-celebrated writing: the stories “Charles” and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (you’ve read one of these two tales, though you may not know it), and her last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

  Though she teased at explanations of sorcery in both her life and her art (an early dust-jacket biography called her “a practicing amateur witch,” and she seems never to have shaken the effects of this debatable publicity strategy), Jackson’s great subject was precisely the opposite of paranormality. The relentless, undeniable core of her writing—her six completed novels and the twenty-odd fiercest of her stories—conveys a vast intimacy with everyday evil, with the pathological undertones of prosaic human configurations: a village, a family, a self. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloging the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, Jackson’s keynotes were complicity and denial, and the strange fluidity of guilt as it passes from one person to another. Her work provides an encyclopedia of such states and has the capacity to instill a sensation of collusion in her readers, whether they like it or not. This reached a pitch, of course, in outraged reactions to “The Lottery”: the bags of hate mail denouncing the story as “nauseating,” “perverted,” and “vicious”; the canceled subscriptions; the warnings to Jackson never to visit Canada.

  Having announced her theme—Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall, finished just prior to “The Lottery,” is a coruscating exposé of suburban wickedness—Jackson devoted herself to burrowing deeper inside the feelings that appalled her, to exploring them from within. Jackson’s biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, tells how in the last part of Jackson’s too-brief life the author succumbed almost entirely to crippling doubt and fear, and in particular to a squalid, unreasonable agoraphobia—a horrible parody of the full-time homemaker’s role she’d assumed both in her life and in her cheery, proto–Erma Bombeckian best sellers Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. However painful her final decade, though, her work enlarges as it descends, from the sly authority of “The Lottery” into moral ambiguity, emotional unease, and self-examination. The novels and stories grow steadily more eccentric and subjective, and funnier, climaxing in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I think is her masterpiece.

  “The Lottery” and Castle are intertwined by the motif of small-town New England persecution; the town, in both instances, is pretty well recognizable as North Bennington, Vermont. Jackson lived there most of her adult life, the faculty wife of literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who taught at nearby Bennington College. Jackson was in many senses already two people when she arrived in Vermont. The first was a fearful ugly duckling, cowed by the severity of her upbringing by a suburban mother obsessed with propriety. This half of Jackson was a character she brought brilliantly to life in her stories and novels from the beginning: the shy girl, whose identity slips all to easily from its foundations. The other half of Jackson was the expulsive iconoclast, brought out of her shell by the marriage to Hyman—himself a garrulous egoist, typical of his generation of Jewish ’50s New York intellectuals—and by the visceral shock of mothering a quartet of noisy, demanding babies. This was the Shirley Jackson whom the town feared, resented, and, depending on whose version you believe, occasionally persecuted. For it was her fate, as an eccentric newcomer in a staid, insular village, to absorb the reflexive anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism felt by the townspeople toward the college. The hostility of the villagers helped shape Jackson’s art, a process that eventually redoubled, so that the latter fed the former. After the succès de scandale of “The Lottery” a legend arose in town, almost certainly false, that Jackson had been pelted with stones by schoolchildren one day, then gone home and written the story. (Full disclosure: I lived in North Bennington for a few years in the early ’80s, and some of the local figures Jackson had contended with twenty years before were still hanging around the town square where the legendary lottery took place.)

  In Castle, Jackson revisits persecution with force and a certain amount of glee, decanting it from the realm of objective social critique into personal fable. In a strategy she’d been perfecting since the very start of her writing, that of splitting her aspects among several characters in the same story, Jackson delegates the halves of her psyche into two odd, damaged sisters: the older Constance Blackwood, hypersensitive and afraid, unable to leave the house; and the younger Merricat Blackwood, a willful demon prankster attuned to nature, to the rhythm of the seasons, and to death, and the clear culprit in the unsolved crime of having poisoned all the remaining members of the Blackwood family (apart from Uncle Julian).

  The three survivors—Constance, Merricat, and the frail and daft Uncle Julian—dwell together in their grand house at the town’s periphery, rehearsing past trauma and fending off change and self-knowledge. Constance cooks and cleans in a time-struck ritual observance of the missing family’s existence, while Merricat makes her magical forays into the woods and her embattled shopping trips into the center of town, there to contend with the creepy mockery of the village children, who propagate the family history of poisoning as a singsong schoolyard legend. Uncle Julian, dependent on Constance’s care, putters at a manuscript, a family history, in an attempt to make sense of the rupture that has so depopulated his little world. Julian’s a reader’s surrogate, framing questions (“Why was the arsenic not put into the rarebit?”) and offering thematic speculations (“My niece is not hard-hearted; besides, she thought at the time that I was among them and although I deserve to die—we all do, do we not?—I hardly think that my niece is the one to point it out.”) that frame our curiosity about the events that Merricat, our narrator, seems so eager to dismiss.

  Merricat’s voice—ingenuous, defiant, and razor-alert—is the book’s triumph, and the river along which this little fable of merry disintegration flows. Despite declaring her eighteen years in the first paragraph, Merricat feels younger, her voice a cousin to Frankie’s in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, or Mattie’s in Charles Portis’s True Grit: an archetype of the feral, pre-sexual tomboy. Merricat is far more disturbing, though, precisely for being a grown woman; what’s sublimated in her won’t be resolved by adolescence. Indeed, typically for Jackson, sexuality is barely present in the book and, needless to say, sexuality is therefore everywhere in its absence.

  The story is a frieze disturbed. Merricat has stilled her family, nailed them like a book to a tree, forever to be unread. When Cousin Charles arrives, transparently in search of the Blackwoods’ hidden fortune (though like everything else in the book, the money’s a purloined letter, secreted in full view), he brings a ripple of disturbance that his cynical mission doesn’t fully account for. Uncle Julian leads us to the brink of speculation when he mentions their ages: Cousin Charles is thirty-two, and Constance is twenty-eight. No one—certainly least of all Merricat—will say that Constance is a kind of Emily Dickinson, drowning sexual yearning in her meticulous housework, and in sheltering her damaged uncle and dangerous sister, but certainly that is the risk that Charles truly represents: the male principle. (Uncle Julian is definitively emasculated, possibly gay—certainly it was his harmlessness that permitted his survival of the poisoning.)

  Merricat, an exponent of sympathetic magic, attacks this risk of nature taking its course by confronting it with nature’s raw, prehuman elements: first by scattering soil and leaves in Charles’s bed, and then by starting a fire: better to incinerate the female stronghold than allow it to be invaded. It’s a cinch to excavate a Freudian subtext
in the scene of the firemen arriving at the house (“the men stepping across our doorsill, dragging their hoses, bringing filth and confusion and danger into our house,” “the big men pushing in,” “the dark men going in and out of our front door”)—just as easy as to do the same with the prose of Henry James. From the Oppenheimer biography we know Jackson objected very strictly to this sort of interpretation, as James surely would have, and as we likely ought to on their behalf. The point isn’t that this material isn’t embedded in Jackson’s narrative; the point is that its embedding is in the nature of an instinctive allusiveness and complexity, forming one layer among many, and that to trumpet such an interpretation as a master key to material so nuanced would be to betray the full operation of its ambiguity. Sex is hardly the only sublimated subject here. Consider that great American taboo, class status: In “The Lottery” undertones of class contempt were coolly objectified; in Castle the imperious, eccentric Blackwoods are conscious of their snobbery toward the village, and conscious, too, how the persecution they suffer confirms their elevated self-image.

  This double confession of culpability is typical of the snares in Jackson’s design: For many of her characters, to revel in injury is a form of exultation, and to suffer exile from drably conformist groups—or families—is not only an implicit moral victory but a form of bohemian one-upmanship as well: We have always lived in the (out)castle, and we wouldn’t want it any other way. Jackson, a famous mother and a tormented daughter, also encoded in her novel an unresolved argument about child-rearing. When at the height of her crisis Merricat retreats to the summerhouse and imaginatively repopulates the family table with her murdered parents, they indulge her: “Mary Katherine should have anything she wants, my dear. Our most loved daughter must have anything she likes … Mary Katherine is never to be punished … Mary Katherine must be guarded and cherished. Thomas, give your sister your dinner; she would like more to eat … bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine.”