Which is weirder? In spite of a great number of short stories and novels, Jackson is familiar to most readers today for the novel The Haunting of Hill House and the short work “The Lottery.” Published in 1949, it’s this latter work that I want to discuss. Even today, over half a decade after she published that work, it’s as fresh and relevant as today’s current events.
Particularly those events that have recently transpired in Nantucket. And because of those very events, Quentin the Clam is dead.
Who is Quentin, though? But I get ahead of myself yet again. I’ll spare you any pompous, self-glorifying analysis of the short story, and just say that I firmly believe Jackson’s weird New England village is set in a post-apocalyptic milieu. You can read it any way you want, of course, as a cutting satirical read on capitalism or the inherent meanness and cruelty of small town life, and that’s fine, too. Villagers, dressed somberly and hushed with fearful expectancy, gather on the town green. They chose the sacrifice by drawing slips of paper from a black wooden box. Tessie dies brutally, stoned by the hands of her fellow citizens, including her own husband and children.
Was the origin of the lottery to keep the population in check? To ensure the villagers conformed to the requirements of that particular society? Was it to guarantee fine weather for the farmers? Weather is an important commodity in an agricultural society, and that’s really why Quentin died, and continues to die each and every February. And because some think he tasted good. Their sharp Nantucket teeth proved that.
Small, close villages like Jackson’s are all too common the world over, and New England seems to have a special twist, or at least a unique patent, on this kind of inward turning any good Gothic requires. That this Gothic strangeness is going on all around us even as the 21st century begins to age is very telling. Jackson, then, had her finger in a stream of thought and history and superstition that runs back from today through the paranoia and death wishes of the Cold War through the dark colonial period of witch hangings, massacres and small pox epidemics.
Now, let’s talk about clams in this country. Marginalized and yet honored by epicureans everywhere, Think for a moment about clambakes. Think about bottles of clam juice lined up on your grocery store shelves. Think about linguini and clams, clam rolls and canned clams. Ponder the country fairs where clam shacks, chambers of horror one and all, ply their terrible and efficient trade. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” says “In the master’s chamber, they gather for the feast.” Indeed.
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